The desert is a place defined by what it lacks, its bleakness an invitation to project and speculate, to imagine new possibilities in the abandoned mining structures and boarded-up brothels. It’s a place where raw materials are hard to come by and unexpected improvisations are necessary to fulfill material needs. From this strategy of making do, the resulting objects hold both their current form and the residue of their previous lives; I want my collages—pieced together from what’s at hand to suggest a possibly unattainable fantasy—to do the same thing. In the no man’s land between fictional archaeological inventory and autobiography, I’ve found terrain to map and mine both what’s present and visible in the desert landscape and, maybe more importantly, what isn’t.

‍