I Think of You on Mountaintops
Cross-Country USA (2012-2013)✳ Collaborator: Paul Richardson
"Landscape is our unwitting biography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, even our fears. If we want to understand ourselves, we would do well to take a searching look at landscapes."
Peirce F. Lewis, Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene
A collaborative series of mobile road residencies that navigated the internal and external spaces we choose to occupy. Each mobile research project was an effort at reading North American landscape and exploring the poetics of big spaces in small ways.
I Think of You On Mountaintops summited several mountain ranges* across America. Beginning in the North Cascades of western Washington and ending at Catoctin Mountain in Maryland (the easternmost ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains), this peripatetic research was an experiment in ups and downs. How do we move from zero to zenith? What is the difference between nadir and nonchalance? How can we recreate the articulated moment of a mountain pass within our own inarticulate atlas of emotion?
The research currently exists as a series of photographs, notes, maps, drawings, and correspondence from time in motion. Our work is powered by an intentional awareness of, and interaction with, the stories that landscapes occupy. Because of the conversational nature of our exploratory methodology, work developed will include sculptural topography, immersive installation, and collaborative cartography.
*These mountain ranges also included: the Blue Mountains and Sawtooth Mountains of the Bitterroot Mountain Range in Idaho; the Wasatch Range, La Sal Mountains, Arches, and Canyonlands of Utah’s Rocky Mountains; the San Juan Mountains and Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado’s Rockies; The Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri; the Cumberland Mountains, the Great Smokies, the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Piedmont Mountains (Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland).
