About Desert Gothic
The origin of the installation Desert Gothic is in its (mildly facetious) title. The desert, the minimum. The compression of being to an essential, central point. Any wilderness contains life at its stripped-down necessity, but the elegant stinginess of desert systems yields a particularly stark distillation. The swinging, soaring lines of man-made wire structures, seen close, mimic the neck-craning skyward gaze of the viewer in a cathedral. The term “gothic” is also a sidewise reference to the simple, unadorned lines of modern sans-serif typography.
Nowhere do electrical and telephone wire structures stand out as they do in a wide open landscape. To foreground the series of draping curves is to imply the presence of open space, of landscape in potential. The shapes are a graphic shorthand for the visual signature of desert, a piece of sense-memory. They’re the after-image of structure not as it is, but as it appears: as seen travelling by car or from a distance when walking across the brush; a traced rhythm of lines curved and straight.