Amazingly enough, it was only when a stretch of drive through the Guadalupe Mountains National Park seemed awfully familiar that I recalled I’d spent another early December climbing the highest mountain in the state of Texas—nearly fifteen years ago to the day on my birthday. At the time I’d recently quit my library technology job in Chicago to become an intern at the Chinati Foundation, where I led tours of the collection and fantasized that I had been invited there as an artist in residence instead (never mind the fact that I had no art practice to speak of). I was ashamed to have quit a position to become an intern, but was convinced this was my only hope for experiencing a few uninterrupted months under a huge West Texas sky.
I returned for most of 2009 to work on a project at Judd Foundation when the itch for the Chihuahuan Desert resumed. This stint introduced me to two dear friends whose endurance for small town living continues to impress me. The first time I met Shelley she was attempting to warm the drafty apartment we’d share above the Judd ranch office by opening the oven door. I remember many evenings in the unheated kitchen eating in fingerless gloves, as if we were camping rather than across the street from Lance Armstrong’s proposed training outpost. (The wifi network that showed up at the same time as his moving trucks? Livestrong.)
These days Shelley lives at and helps sail the Marfa Yacht Club, where she has her own airstream trailer. The view is much more expansive, as seen above, and I think she finds it a lot easier to keep toasty
Sandro and I also met on the job, when I took a couple of weeks off of cataloging and indoor camping to assist on adobe construction and pitch an actual outdoor tent for shelter. Where ever he’s set up, you’ll be sure to find large jars of regional clays in an array of different colors nearby to use for plastering.
Last year when I was in town, I brought some collages and a tub of wheatpaste. While this wasn’t an the experiments I was likely to share at the time, it is one of the interventions I was readily able to locate and document on this visit. The original composition is below, which gives a sense of what a year out in the elements does to a fragment of Penelope Cruz’s chin and neck topped off by a waterfall.
