Compound YV gallery hosts closing reception for their experimental Compact Residency this Saturday (6/27)
This Saturday (6/27) Compound YV gallery presents a new publication and installation. The event is the closing reception for Compound’s new Compact Residency, which gives artists a shorter, more experimental format to utilize the gallery space during the slower summer months. Reporter Gabriel Hart takes a closer look at the show and how one artist used neighborhood dogs as their muse.
In reference to the number of people living in the Morongo Basin, 3 out of 70,968 features a triad of artists who studied Lucy Lippard’s 1997 book Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society, focusing on two essays “Out the Picture Window” and “Places with a Present.” Artists Aida Lizalde, Aidan Koch, and Kristen Jean Wheatley have responded through their own work discussing land-use, natural disaster, localism, and familiarity through their experiences living and making in the Morongo Basin. Previously featured in last fall’s Waiting for the Wind group show, Kristen Jean Wheatley returns to the Compound with this more research-focused collaboration, this time capturing neighborhood dogs’ response to her movement during her daily walks.
“I basically recorded their reactions to me walking. I walk and run the same route every day and I recorded them barking behind the fences in their backyards and front yards as I go by, and I stitched them together in the order of the route that I go on so they’re sequenced as I would encounter them. I’m not in the video; I’m more like the ghostly figure that they chase along the fence lines. The video is still and as I’m running along the route you can see the dogs moving along and reacting to me running along the fence or barking or trying to get closer to me as I run the route that I do every day. I wanted to just be their reaction, purely,” said Wheatley.
Wheatley’s work encourages audiences to look around and question how they consume, interact with, and even depend on the movement of resources, people, information, and themselves. As for the two other artists: Aiden Koch’s work uses modes of ecological storytelling to explore loving and fraught relationships between humans, animals, and landscapes; ceramicist Aida Lizalde explores the interplay between the natural and artificial, the physical and psychological, and the potential for harmony and failure within these relationships.
The closing reception for 3 out of 70,968 starts at 6:00 p.m. this Saturday at Compound YV gallery, located at 55379 Twentynine Palms Hwy in Old Town Yucca Valley next to Snakebite Roadhouse. Free and open to the public.
