I am so excited to share a new adventure in economic research and community. I am delighted to share in the role in taking over Sun Spot, a cooperative local artist shop at the Sky Village Swap Meet in Yucca Valley open on Saturdays from 9a-1pm. Elena Yu created and founded the project in 2022 and I participated as a member artist.
This year, I am looking forward to building upon previous experience with artist-and-alternative economies as well as learning about desert weekend marketplace exchanges. The site is a hub for bargain hunters and desert conversationalists alike.
I am working alongside the amazing fellow desert artist, Jillian Sandell, as Sun Spot’s co-stewards for this season. We are doing our best to learn alongside Elena’s vision and the current artist members experiences as we manifest a marketplace for artists that stands proudly outside of grind culture and wealthy patronage which often persists in popular imaginations of artist offerings.
Sun Spot offers a hub for shopping for artist’s local and experimental works as well as workshops and performative engagements during the shop’s Saturday hours. Please stay tuned to the project’s instagram account for the latest in workshop offerings.
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.
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
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.
