Wendover Report
CLUI Wendover
The Center’s Wendover Residence Program had another busy season in 2010, with more than a dozen new Residence Program participants over the season, several groups using the facilities, and the usual periodic clusters of visitors, random passer-bys, and recidivists.
New Residence Program participants included John Hopkins, an itinerant media artist and geophysical engineer; Miriam Sagan, a writer from New Mexico; Eva Castringuis, a landscape photographer from Germany; Kelly Loudenberg, a filmmaker from New York who worked on several film projects in the region, including one about the simulated Mars Station in Hanksville, Utah; Mary Kavanaugh, an artist and chair of the Department of Art at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, who filmed explosions at the UTTR for a film project; Ruth Dusseault, Artist in Residence at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta; Moritz Fehr and Maria Muhle, artists from Berlin who are working on a sound and image piece about Dugway’s German Village; Barry Underwood, an installation/landscape/light artist from Ohio; Brian Rosa and Adam Ryder, artists from Manchester UK, and Brooklyn NY; William Keddell, a stereoscopic photographer from Florida; and Lea Rekow, of New Mexico/Rio, who did a research and soil sampling project called Terminal Landscapes that is now on display in Exhibit Hall 2.
Now on display is the work of 2010 resident William Lamson, entitled A Work in Slow Descent, which involved covering the windows of the Exhibit Hall in caramel. Lamson’s work at Wendover, and at the Center’s Desert Research Station in Hinkley, California, involved observational research into the transformation of materials though the application of solar radiation.
Lucy Raven’s film China Town, conceived and partially executed while in residence at CLUI Wendover, remains on display, visitable year around in a self-serve theater in Exhibit Hall 2.
Several former residents returned in 2010 to do more work, including the writer Ginger Strand, photographer Joni Sternbach, landscape architect/theorist/researcher Sarah Cowles, Smudge Studio, and artist/photographer Neal White.
The annual work party in July brought a couple of dozen people to Wendover for maintenance work, which include the annual sweep of bat guano out of the large shed at Southbase, performed expertly by Jed Lackritz and Philip Weil, as usual, and an elaborate attempt to convince/coerce the bats to move to an adjacent unused building, aided by the sound advice of eminent bat biologist Diana Simons. A great shout-out of thanks goes to John Fitchen, John Brinton Hogan, and all others who showed up for the work party.
Exhibit Hall 1 was in limbo for much of 2010, for the airport now locks the gate that surrounds it and other buildings in that compound for security reasons, requiring visitors to go to the airport office and get the combination, or to find someone to let them in. Also, an unfriendly dog has been in residence in an adjacent structure for several months. We will probably take over another building outside that fenced area to replace Exhibit Hall 1. It will likely be the old hospital ward building next to the CLUI Orientation Building, which has a decent roof, but that’s about it. This work will be the focus of the next annual Wendover Work Party in late July, 2011.
Other visitors and projects in Wendover in 2010 included the two Land Arts of the American West programs from the University of New Mexico and Texas Tech University, which made their annual week-long, back-to-back stops in Wendover, bringing energetic and creative students to work on their often surprising site-based projects in the region. One group helped Simparch with water capturing systems at Southbase, and another was given a hands-on introduction to live fire hot house training by Wendover’s former police chief, Vaughn Tripp.
2011 promises to be another busy year at Wendover when the season opens up again in April. ♦