MOJAVE
Curated by Mollie Doctrow and Gabriel Thorburn
June 5th – July 31st, 2021
Mojave Catalog
Featuring artists who have participated in the The Mojave National Preserve Artists- in-Residence program, the exhibition depicts a variety of interpretations of the magnificent landscape, history, culture, ecology, and geology of the Mojave National Preserve.
Artworks include traditional and contemporary media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition includes the following artists: Gerard Burkhart, Mollie Doctrow, Dani Dodge, Christine Huhn, Natalie Larsen, Eric Merrell, Amir Moshfegh, Kristine Paiz, Britney Penouilh, Emily Silver, and Allanah Vokes.
The Mojave National Preserve Artists Foundation, a not-for-profit National Park Service Friends Group operates the Artist-in-Residence program. The goal of the program is to provide artistic and educational opportunities to promote a deeper understanding of and dialogue about the natural and cultural resources of Mojave National Preserve.
Artists selected for the program are juried by the Mojave National Preserve Artists Foundation, Park Service officials, and community representatives with artistic qualifications to form a jury panel. Artists selected for the program discover and interpret the Mojave landscape through their own creative projects.
Britney Penouilh
Mixed-media, AIR 2019
Embracing the dynamism of a changing landscape as viewed through “geologic time,” Earth Through Time, references 650 million years of transmutation in the Providence Mountains, Mojave National Preserve.
Emily Silver
Mixed-media painting, AIR 2019
Silver’s work investigates the role paint plays in our psychic understanding of land. Her residency work will include a series of paintings inspired by walks on the Mojave Road. Conveying abstract sensations such as light, ghosts, patterns and textures, silence, and aridity, her visual vocabulary includes flows and aggregates of water, pigment, salt, sediment, cracked mud, and relics of textural materials, often superimposed over satellite photos, and maps.
Dani Dodge
Interdisciplinary artist, installation, AIR 2021
Incorporating painting, sculpting, and videography, Dodge will create an immersive environment allowing visitors to see and experience the beauty of the adaptations that desert species have developed to survive.
Eric Merrell
Painting, AIR 2020
Working on location Merrell will create a series of paintings depicting both day and night time. The work will showcase the contrasting moods between these two halves of the desert.
Kristine Paiz
Videography, painting, AIR 2020
HALY’A ‘AHWAT is an interpretation of a chronicle of people who have lived in the Mojave dating to the 1600s. Paiz will create an interactive, narrative video, ‘Aha Makhav, posing questions about the history of the Mojave and the ghosts of the desert. ‘Aha Makhav will be projected from a podium toward the center of the room, playing on a loop. Visitors are encouraged to walk through the projection for an immersive experience. Paiz will also exhibit a series of corresponding paintings.
Mollie Doctrow
Printmaking, AIR 2019
Doctrow will exhibit, Through the Flowers: Plant Communities of Mojave National Preserve, a series of black and white botanical woodcuts showing individual species and plant habitats. The series will show plants growing at different elevations and in habitats such as creosote shrub scrub and pinyon-juniper woodlands. The exhibit will include an interactive shrine box honoring the Mojave Yucca.
Natalie Larsen
Drawing, AIR 2020
Larson’s work explores themes of the westward trek in the United States, migration, spirituality, and the landscape. Her work in the Mojave will explore the homesteaded area in the Preserve as well as those that traveled through the Old Spanish Trail and other passages, and how this impacted the native inhabitants. Larson will exhibit a series of drawings about these histories, using research and images from the residency.
Allanah Vokes
Digital drawing, AIR 2020
Vokes created a video interpolation of images of the Mojave National Preserve projected into a StyleGAN2 model trained on screenshots from the video game “Fallout 3: New Vegas”.
Christine Huhn
Photography, AIR 2019
Huhn will document the fragile desert landscape using black and white film photography that she will process in her studio.