In January I was invited to be join the 2023 Cohort of Artists with the Desert Research Library. A project sprung from the High Desert Test Sites. This library is unique among special library projects I have experienced. The entire collection is curated through artist’s selections. In being invited as an artist, I was invited to curate a selection of reading materials for a library in the desert. Being a super fan of all libraries- so quiet! so full of ideas! so teeming with future potential! so careful in preserving history! I was so excited to contribute my own ideas and archive of thinking and material to the library.
Of course, I went down my own rabbit hole tangent which involved spending A LOT of time researching video games, gaming history and philosophy and interweaving research on desert landscapes as gaming landscape. By mid-March, I had surfaced a short list of games that I believed were worth including in a library whose focus is the desert. I was also prepared with my understandings of video games as a kind of cultural property which we can “read” like a long form novel as justification for inclusion in a library of artist’s researching.
Four of my paintings are up and available at Compound Yucca Valley Gallery through June 4th. Each is a watercolor on paper mounted on MDF which I custom cut with a jigsaw to match edges. The forms oscillate between landscape and object, challenging the flatness of an image surface with their substantial mounting as sculptural portal. The group show was co-curated by Caroline Partamian and Lara Wilson.
Imaginary Landscapes
Joshua Almendinger, Mary Jeys Amy Kim Keeler Tynan Kerr, Allegra Pacheco, and Emily Silver.
Compound Yucca Valley is at 55372 Twentynine Palms Highway, Yucca Valley, CA
I am participating in a new shop in the Sky Village Swap Meet open every Saturday from 9am to 1pm. I am offering small items like mugs, postcards and cyanotype kits. Everything in the shop is under $50 and is run as a collective and with support from Arts Connection and the Arts Council of San Bernardino.
Sun Spot is at the Sky Village Swap Meet, 7028 Theater Road, Yucca Valley CA
I am joining the HWY 62 Open Studio Art Tour this year. In it’s 21st year here in this region spanning 8 desert communities, the tour is these weekends: October 8-9, 15-16, and 22-23, 2022.
My studio will be open on: October 8-9 and October 22-23 from 10am-5pm.
I will be visiting other studios on the second weekend. Please reach out if you will be around or if you want to visit studios with me!
I’d like to share with you some of the highlights of my first year in the wildly freeing and welcoming place I have been treating as a self-made artist residency and new home.
Hello from “other desert cities”
The high desert which includes Joshua Tree, Pioneertown, Landers, Yucca Valley, 29 Palms and Wonder Valley is an area indicated on a highway sign on I-10 as “other Desert Cities”. I first came here with friends in 2019. After the pandemic insisted road trip escapes only, Hashem and I visited here and agreed it was special and inviting. Over the summer of 2021, we took the plunge to make this “other” rural desert our home.
This painting, Days 227-229 is on view at the Mind’s Eye exhibition at Joshua Tree Art Gallery in downtown Joshua Tree, CA. Artist’s Reception (6-8pm) and Gallery Talk (7pm) on Saturday, September 10.
Observatory exhibition, Tahoe Gallery, Sierra Nevada University, Nevada January 2022 Mary Jeys and Sarah Logan
The work presented in Observatory was the first version of presenting from the archive of collected livestream videos. I presented a burning candle at a window at sunset on a TV monitor, a pot of water going from cold-poured to boiling on an iPad, and myself and my own watching and waiting on an iPhone. I installed a dorm room to call to the visitor’s mind and body an experience of watching and waiting at a networked happening in a site-specific sleeping quarters. I chose to perform toasting bread as an everyday activity that shifts bread or stale bread to palatable toast.
The work was available not only in the gallery, but also on Twitch whose daily active users spend an average of 95 minutes watching streamers stay at their camera for over 8 hours in any given day. The opportunity that I saw was to introduce my own artistic play into a place of durational long watching that might offer an introspective offering that could invite a togetherness across the experience of our screens.
I view this work as an invitation to consider our position of solo screen time as both a site of unknowing or otherspace that can invite or provoke emotional conditions for change within the visitor and to point to the place of online engagement as instructive in our solitude.
Untitled Portal, Candle Video of recorded livestream, video monitor Livestreamed October 18, 2021 TRT: 02:34:37
For this project, I am working with live internet time. Ever since we were forced by health and safety guidelines to stay at home during the Covid-19 pandemic and many workplaces became our homes we lived our lives evermore in front of our screens. This work was developed exclusively considering the meaning in this context. I have created programming for live-streaming on my Twitch channel towards unknowing each day through December 5th as follows:
My portion of this artist talk starts at the 1:22:10 point of the video. I talk about what it feels like to be making work during the pandemic and coping with mental strategies to both address my body and my mind while hiking. During this Zoom presentation, I present a recording of myself while wearing the same clothing as the recorded version of myself.
A collection of currencies I have come across through my Brooklyn Torch Project will be on display in a group show at the Galveston Arts Center in an exhibition curated by Dennis Nance titled Value Exchange this summer/fall. If you are in or near Galveston, please check it out.
July 13 – October 6, 2019 Opening Reception, Saturday, July 13, 2019 6:00 – 9:00 PM Artist talks at 6:30 PM
