Land Slide Cloister

LAND
SLIDE
CLOISTER

Working idea for the Deep End Ranch project,
Connecting the failed ranch Skriðuklaustur, Iceland to the Deep End Ranch

As previously mentioned in the Reality letter about reality and naked women and or couples and how it relates to the idea of failed dreams, dreamt by city folk who venture into the country to live out their fantasy, I´ve been interested in drawing a parallel between the two ranches in separate corners of the world. I´m still thinking over the best way to go about it and there are several projects I am doing (some might shrink, disappear and produce new babies).




1)In the kitchen window at the Deep End Ranch, placing a TV playing a still shot of the view from Skriðuklaustur. Voicing over the silent room in which the video was originally shot, I´ll read a section from the writer who built the ranch, as he contemplates on the farm in one of his pieces.

2)For a show at Skriðuklaustur (direct translation Land Slide Cloister) this summer (a group show of folk, outsider, contemporary, non and every other kind of artist that the director is contacting, its not a professionally organized thing and is very misch-masch) I will send a picture of the Deep End Ranch. The show in the Iceland Ranch is supposed to be only photographs, drawings or paintings of the house at Skriðuklaustur.

3)Sound piece at the hot-tub at Deep End ranch. A vocal piece, conversation, monologue or dialogue, still needs to be decided, about public nudity and communal bathing.

(this might be edited out, but at the moment i´m doing a piece which will be carried out at the olympic swimming pool in Reykjavik, its a blurp-based sound piece, spoken through loudspeakers directed at the hot tubs, by life guards from a guarding tower in the pool, and will reflect on the issue of communal bathing and the idea of public nudity.)

SITE, SIDE, SIGHT
The site specificity of these projects is based on the idea of connecting two linked sites. Establishing a link that would not otherwise excist. The idea of placing the video of the view from the writers ranch kitchen to the artists ranch in California and dubbing it with a translated text about home and identity talks to the process of settlement, attempts to establish a place.

A extract from one of the possible texts,
"one are the years when I was young and still innocent except for original sin . . . the years when adventures brought me experience without bitterness . . . the years when my sympathy with all things living was uncritical and intense . . . when God seemed to me a generous, friendly grandfather, the Devil a rather dangerous and moody but, on the whole, essentially stupid and harmless godfather . . . the years when light was triumphant indeed, and all evil, all fear, could be turned aside by an Our Father or the sign of the cross . . . the years when in the morning I could but dimly foresee the evening, and sat safely in the shelter of a wall of sods playing with straw . . . these indeed are the years that will never return.
And it is not only the years that have passed. Many of those then living are now dead, others scattered to the winds; even their memory only peeps out intermittently, like stars between the breaks in a cloud-covered sky."