CLUI Exhibit Hall in Wendover, Utah
AN EXHIBITION OF WORK BY recent participants in the Center's Wendover Residence Program is currently on display at the CLUI's Exhibit Hall in Wendover, Utah. The exhibit of original photographs and documentation of work is open to the public 24 hours a day.
Featured in the exhibit are sixteen large format photographs by Jennifer Steensma, a photographer from Michigan who created a series of photos entitled Terra Incognita which recontextualize military and industrial forms as formal abstractions, resembling works of land art like that of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, who used this region of Utah for large scale works in the 1970s.
Documentation of the site-specific work of other artists in the program is displayed as well, including the work of sculptors Jennifer Odem and John Reed (from Texas and California, respectively), who built wind propelled kinetic sculptures which were placed on the vast surrounding salt flats and left to wander across the landscape; Jeremy Kunkel (Los Angeles) who installed five camera obscuras in the Wendover area; German sculptor Alice Konitz who modified a house trailer, utilizing reflective foil and plexiglass, involving the harsh sun of this remote desert region to create a eternally sun-baked installation; and artist Kelly Coyne (San Diego) who sent a rocket propelled camera 700 feet into the air for a series of aerial photos entitled Tragic Trajectories.
Since being initiated in1997, the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Wendover Artist in Residence Program has been able to provide time, space, and material assistance for numerous artists, researchers and scientists, all working in original ways, and stimulated by a unique environment. This show contains work created during the first round of residencies and reflects the great diversity of Wendover Residence Program participants - sculptors, photographers, conceptual artists, and scientists have all made this remarkable landscape their home and workshop during the past two years.
The facilities at the Center's Wendover Complex continue to improve, due mainly to the efforts of dedicated volunteers, and the continued generosity of the National Endowment for the Arts. This summer, the annual Wendover Work Party was staged over the week of June 23, and about a dozen people drove out to the remote Utah town to help.
A new exhibit space was carved out of one of the old military buildings, and a manufactured office unit was trucked up from Los Angeles for use as a "clean and comfortable work space," a dust free 700 square foot building that has central heat and is even air conditioned. "We're not creating the Ritz here", said CLUI's Wendover Program Coordinator Sarah Simons, "but it's close."
Thanks to all the work party volunteers: John Fitchen, Amy Balkin, David Cunningham, Igor and David Vamos, Edward Coolidge, Moritz Fehr (all the way from Germany!), Erik Knutzen, and Cheryl Cotman. Some of the new facilities leased by the CLUI at Wendover include structures at South Base, the exotic and parched portion of the old airbase where munitions were once stored. This dramatic location is totally isolated and more than a mile out into the flats. "[South Base] is one of the most spectacular places in America," said Simons. "If we had the resources to bring in water and power we'd like to move the whole program out here."
