Preparing for this residency, we realize the need to have some sort of plan for the work we want to make, but we also want to leave room for the inevitable evolution that will take place once we reach our destination and explore our surroundings. Below is our original proposal for the residency. Almost a year has passed since it was written, and in that time a lot of work has been made...ideas have already shifted and developed. It's possible - and maybe preferable - that the outcome of this residency will be much different than we initially decided."Our past sculptures and site-specific installations have incorporated small-scale Midwestern farm buildings, especially a particular farmhouse that is an amalgam of several remembered houses from our combined rural histories. Parallel to the sculptural work, we began a series of photographic studies of these miniatures exploring the perceptual effects of decontextualizing and recontextualizing them. The camera helps create an ambiguous sense of scale as a result of the proximity of the lens in relation to the miniature, combined with the use of unfamiliar landscapes that juxtapose the Midwestern vernacular of the buildings we have built. Through developing this series, we reveal the shifting nature of context that is a modern reality: it has now become impractical for most people to stay in one place for a lifetime. The result is a loss of what the home once represented: security, comfort, self. Rather, we now think of our houses as temporary dwelling places and investment opportunities. We are re-examining the house as a symbol of self that has become displaced.
While at the Residency, we plan to continue photographing miniatures, engaging the Wendover landscape as a distinctly non-Midwestern, unfamiliar environment. We intend to expand our use of photography to include video and/or film to explore the artifice and illusion of miniatures as film sets. The unusual climate and weather conditions of the region will help us investigate disaster and disorientation – two notions that will also expand concepts of displacement.
We intend for the proposed work to align with the interpretive mission of CLUI in that we are exploring the house as a representation of identity in conflict with our changing relationship to the land as an anchorage point and ancestral territory."
