A collaborative installation
with surround-sound environment by Steven M. Miller
and large-format black and white photographs by Jennifer Schlesinger
Artists' Statement
Along its course, the Pecos River links a multitude of geographies, joining a diversity of uses and abuses, personal and cultural relationships to it waters, and histories, myths, and possible futures. The river traverses public and private lands, designated wilderness and urban space, agriculture and industry, as it winds its way through Eastern New Mexico and ultimately across West Texas to the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo. Mapping aural, visual, social, and physical geographies of the Pecos River through abstract representations of time and place, Along the Pecos offers an immersive multivalent experience of sonic and visual interpretations of the river and its surroundings. In bridging the aural and visual, documentation and abstract representation, site-specificity and portable installation, Along the Pecos is intended to refocus and recontextualize issues of ecology and relationship to place along the complex polymorphous river environment. Additionally, by presenting sonic and visual images through abstraction and simultaneous multiplicity, it engages in a critical dialogue with notions of representation.
Miller’s sound recordings gather aural impressions of place along the Pecos River from near the headwaters in North Central New Mexico down through the southeast corner of state. Arranged in a multilayered and multi-channel surround-sound composition, the recordings both expose and investigate the complex sonic environment to be found along the river and among its surroundings. Rejecting attempts to romanticize nature sounds as somehow separate and isolated from the human world, the recordings – and their resulting compositional matrix – instead embrace the varied textures, timbres, and rhythms to be found along the river as it negotiates passage among the diverse cultures, geographies, and settings through which it courses. Birds, planes, automobiles, wind, insects, and the ever-present and ever-changing water channel itself provide only some of the more common among the seemingly endless array of sonic impressions.
Schlesinger’s photographs situate these acoustic interpretations of the Pecos River through visual images of place. For this project, she has been photographing various organic environments found in the region of Northern New Mexico. These photographs, a study from her Earth Series, present natural forces such as water, wind and light through abstractions of familiar patterns found in nature landscapes. They make visible the forces in nature that are often difficult to discern yet are powerful connotations of the physics of the natural world. Presented in 16”x20” toned gelatin silver prints, these images result in complex abstract patterns that rely heavily on the subtlety of detail.
Another visual element in the project are the Earth Maps, which utilize the same investigation of natural patternings as the Earth Series, but here individual 16”x20” images are brought together to form a diptych or a “quad-tych” connecting and juxtaposing the constituent images. Maps have been used throughout history to describe land formations and provide directions for traversing or finding specific locations. Schlesinger’s Earth Maps investigate the common utilitarian notion of maps as tools through an abstract idea: to “map” these patterns found in the Pecos River region that may become familiar once they are linked together. The result is a landscape map of a particular locale that forms by virtue of the elements in nature.
Dislocating these sonic and visual images – both temporally and locationally – from their points of origin, Along the Pecos reconfigures experience of place – both the here and there, the now and then – by isolating fragments of time and place and redeploying them in new spatio-temporal formations of sequence and simultaneity. Through this isolation, decontextualization, and reconfiguration, sense of place opens up to a new perspective – a fiction which we hope will elicit curiosity, heighten sensory awareness, and provide a vantage point from which to re-examine attitudes and habits of being in relation to the multiple points of origins themselves – along the Pecos.
- Steven M. Miller & Jennifer Schlesinger, Santa Fe NM