Without Mountains and Rivers Without End: Speculative Geographics on an Interior Northwest

About

This weird and dynamic show of fourteen artists, poets, and musicians takes the focus of the geo-regions of the Eastern Cascades, Northeastern Sierra Nevada, and Western Great Basin, and presents work from these artists as they relate to ecology and society through their own layered dreams, visions, ideas of near futures, and deep pasts of this elusive and mysterious place.

In an indirect and limited glance, as through the side-mirror on the highway, or reflected image caught in surveillance lens or mountain creek, this exhibition wonders about the grainy seams and edges between the North American geo-regions of the Eastern Cascades, Northeastern Sierra Nevada, and Western Great Basin. With the hypothesis that a re-framing and blurred focus might help to see a subject anew, these fourteen artists engage in speculative strategies as they relate to ecology and society through their own layered dreams, visions, ideas of near futures and deep pasts of this elusive and mysterious place.

The focus on this particular part of the Intermountain Northwest identifies a region with much in common, yet perhaps without much understanding in the broader cultural imagination. Artists included might have a unique understanding and relationship with this place, yet might also live outside these soft boundaries, around the perimeter looking in or out, or have work that resonates well in this place. Ranging from absurdity and humor to horror, the paranormal, dystopia and utopia, work from fourteen artists provoke many ideas about this geographic psyche: the role of water in the desert, wildfire, volcanic and tectonic geology, certain climate and social collapses, exploitation, migration, genocide and violence, and articulating some visionary narrative that complicates these themes. Here the artists themselves employ varying approaches and useful terms such as geopoetics, meso-futurism, counter-mapping, experimental geography, deep ecology, photojournalism, Indigenous abstraction, among others.

The exhibition title serves as a reference and hypothetical negation of the 1996 long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End by poet Gary Snyder in 1996, hailed as a masterpiece of American poetry and considered a "fundamental wisdom text for the modern ecological movement". The poem, developed over nearly forty years, utilizes Buddhist philosophy, Jungian archetypal psychology, and varying ecological and mythological images together to outline a worldview and history, notably much of which occurs in places of reverence for Snyder, like Pyramid Lake, Black Rock Desert, across the Sierra and Cascades. Snyder returned to the University of Nevada, Reno in 1996 to produce an artist-book Finding the Space at the Black Rock Press in Department of Art, featuring four sections of Mountains and Rivers Without End before it's full publication. Together the form of the exhibition invokes shared qualities of cinema, poetry, and music, finding similarity and leaping associations across the visual and material culture of type-written poems, screenplays, detective novels, scientific field notes, and their shared inquiries into Mystery. What are some utopian aims of ecologic justice in the West? Who are the sad clowns, sentient aliens, broken heroes, future archeologists, spell-hurling witches, or super villains in the mythic story of mining and the internet in data centers, surveillance tech, and lithium extraction?