No Absolutes
Contemporary Art from the Region
October 8, 2000 - January 7, 2001
Catalogue Essay - Leslie Hill and Helen Paris
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris
The uncertainty of the moment is not a new concept within the environment
of the desert. Unpredictable monsoon rains can bring life to barren areas
seemingly void of existence, though perhaps only temporarily. Deserter,
an installation by Helen Paris and Leslie Hill, involves performances,
captured on video, of artists who have come to the desert to create, or
bring life, to the area for a limited period of time.
Setting out on symbolic journeys of self-discovery, the artists walk toward the viewer through open desert. Their video images appear on monitors facing toward a mechanical bull, placed at the center of the installation. The bull metaphorically represents a highly romanticized and urbanized version of the cowboy's once independent, nomadic lifestyle: one of solitude, survival against the elements and self-reliance.
The artists, including Paris, Hill, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Julie Tolentino, Helena Goldwater, Christine Molloy and Sita Willemse, used art residencies in Arizona as a way of “being” in this “cowboyesque” space. It is a space often void of the apparent influence of major urban centers, but filled with the subtle beauty and vastness stereotypically characteristic of the American southwest. Not just an empty or forsaken physical place, the desert environment, according to the artists, is a state of mind, one of time and space, image and mirage, isolation and, ultimately, desertion - an act of abandonment, as the artists state, “wherein what is no longer present is most apparent.”
John D. Spiak
Curatorial Museum Specialist
Arizona State University Art Museum
Return to the No Absolutes exhibition
For more information contact John Spiak at spiak@asu.edu.
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