"Place / Displace" with Hannah Barnes, 2009

In Place / Displace, Hannah Barnes and I explored the dichotomy of placement (where objects were found in the landscape alongside famous earthworks) versus how they were presented once removed and mailed thousands of miles away.

We created nesting boxes for ease in packing and labeled them with a wood burning tool that included formal symbols we knew from photographs (the sloping interior of a smoothed crater, the large gap on the mesa, the grid of aluminum poles, and so on). I collected what caught my attention (mainly rocks and wood) and an object that represented the experience – twisted ranching wire at Roden Crater, cracked mud from Sun Tunnels, and a reflective shard in homage to Robert Smithson’s “mirror displacements” at Spiral Jetty. I sent all six boxes from Wendover, Utah and in Indiana, Hannah meticulously arranged the contents on her living room floor as proof of their arrival.

Later, we would install the objects in an exhibition where Hannah's systematic ordering resembled specimen. There were displayed alongside six photographs showing my careful placement of fresh plant matter and a wedged rock emulating Michael Heizer's Negative Megalith #5. All would be severely altered in shipping.

This was an early foray in the questioning of what one could or should not take from the land in the name of art and in the memory of remembering a place.