The traveler transforms perceptions into narratives and places into imagined spaces -- spaces in which the traveler grasps both a sense of the temporal moment and imagines the potential trajectories that the events of any moment might hold. When John Wesley Powell navigated the Colorado River in 1869 and began a project of mapping the western deserts, he envisioned what the desert landscape might look like populated with settlers. He argued for sustainable growth and was expelled from office. About 100 years later, writer Edward Abbey encounters a very different West. The land is owned, mapped, gridded, dammed, mined and crisscrossed with roads, paths and pipelines. The writer walks the canyons to re-imagine a desert landscape. He draws attention to the destruction of the land including the construction of dams that flooded and buried the natural and cultural sites John Wesley Powell once wrote about. His works give record to a 1960s and 1970s culture of desert environmental activism and rebellion. Viewers explore the processes that led Abbey and his local community to make the choices they did -- choices grounded in an American tradition that goes back to the Boson Tea party: direct action and sabotage. These new works have been featured in galleries and online venues. An online discussion will be held Sunday at 1030am in conjunction with an exhibition funded by Subito (www.subitopress.org).
For more information about unknown territories, visit the project: www.unknownterritories.org.
photographs, aluminum tube
All rights reserved, Roderick Coover
[Bio c. 2010] Roderick Coover is Associate Professor at Temple University, where he teaches courses in visual research and documentary methods. He specializes in multimedia forms of representation. His works include, among others, Cultures in Webs: Working In Hypermedia With The Documentary Image (www.culturesinwebs.com), From Verite To Virtual: Conversations On The Frontier Of Documentary Film And Visual Anthropology (www.der. org), The Theory Of Time Here (www.vdb.org), The Language Of Wine: An Ethnography Of Work, Wine And The Senses (www.languageofwine.com), Unknown Territories (www.unknownterritories.org), and the forthcoming book project Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technologies In The Humanities And Arts (University of...
Ethnographic Terminalia first exhibition was a group exhibition of installation works that showed at the Ice Box gallery (Crane Arts, Philadelphia)