Journals from the Chihuahuan Desert
Rachel Ann Manera - 2010, 15:13, video, Texas
The La Junta de los Rios heartland was a cultural crossroads for the native peoples and later a highway of conquest for the Spanish explorers. A last frontier for the true-grit pioneers of the American West, the region sat ringside during the Mexican Revolution. This isn't really Texas, America or Mexico. It’s a far away, forgotten place, an isolated topography that has been lost in previous centuries. Journals from the Chihuahaun Desert visually illustrates moments of rManeraʼs eighteen month sojourn in an extreme climate and the inhabitants it encapsulates.
Rachel Manera has been on a self-directed assignment immersed in the Big Bend country of southwest Texas. She has straddled the Rio Grande observing, collecting and documenting remote life in the desert. Her excavations of frontier repositories and rummages throughout ruins of ghost-towns have created a massive collection of artifacts and data. The union between the artist, the landscape and these found discards conceptually develop with her sensitive perception. Salvaging these fragments of the past initiates a temporal understanding into the present. Maneraʼs assemblages of recontextualized detritus are elemental structures in her large-scale constructions. She combines the three dimensional with two, incorporating film, photography and/or video into ephemeral installations.
Questions & Answers
ATA: The video's observations really do come across as pages in a journal or sketches in a naturalist's notebook. How did you come to be in the Chihihuan desert? How long did you stay, and what made you leave?
RM: After receiving a Chinati Foundation residency program, rejection letter and inducing something of a Carlos Castaneda experience, I found myself chasing trains, tumbleweeds and wandering the Chihuahuan desert. Im still in the C. desert however, my HQ is currently based 75 miles north of the Rio Grande Border. For eighteen months, I lived along the river, in the desolate village of Redford, Texas with an elderly population of maybe, twenty-two. The Redford post-office is the only available service for twenty miles and I would shop for surplus across the river in Ojinga, Mexico.
Isolating oneself is an interesting experiment but just not for too long.
ATA: Some of the sequences look like stop-motion animated photographs. I was curious about your choice to use such a technique, and wondered if you've been influenced by other artists who work in a similar vein (Lucy Raven's China Town comes to mind).
RM: A part of my hiatus from San Francisco is to reduce the influence of external artistic and creative over-stimuli, an attempt to simplify. With everything less available, I obtained my first digital camera. Journals, was made capturing a combination of still and moving images. I had a rare moment to candidly photograph my eighty-eight year old, reclusive neighbor Joe Lamar. At that time I had no idea the still images would successfully develop into the video vignette “burning tumbleweeds”.
ATA: Is there anything I should have asked you?
RM: Yes, for me to import a fine bottle of tequila and bring it to the festival. Salud!
Q&A by Liz Wing
