"Imprinting Place" by Erika Osborne

Here is another image from THE LAND/an art site, from the Given Take June 2008 installation curated by Erika Osborne, who also created the body map images, in her fascinating Imprinting Place series.
She writes:

The landscape marks us if we let it. If we bring to it our sensory awareness - our bare backs, our hands and our eyes. It is on these surfaces that Place scrawls its signature in clay, water and light. The record becomes ours, differing from person to person and place-to-place as it fuses with the baggage we carry with us to each vista. It morphs and smears with the cultural, intellectual and social overlays that make us who we are. The work becomes a collaboration between rock, back, sun and eye. It is a translation, fueled by connection.

The other map is by Devon Kovach, from the Take Back exhibit at THE LAND; it is reviewed here by David Leigh. There are interesting overlaps and relationships at THE LAND between the map and the territory.

THE LAND/an Art Site

My friend Edite Cates, of La Montanita Co-op (an innovative community leader in Albuquerque, Gallup, and Santa Fe) is an artist who also runs THE LAND/an art site and THE LAND/gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband Thomas Cates. To learn more, click over to their beautiful website, where I got these photos.

THE LAND/an art site, Inc., a non-profit organization, provides environmental artists with opportunities to work and exhibit in New Mexico, and works to promote awareness of environmental issues through the arts.

THE LAND maintains offices, a resource center and a gallery space in downtown Albuquerque, and a forty-acre outdoor site in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains devoted exclusively to site-specific, environmentally low-impact, land-based art. THE LAND/an art site was established in 1998 and incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2000. Its mission is to promote environmental art by providing artists with a work site and exhibition space, and to educate the public about the environment through art.

THE LAND challenges artists to expand on the ideas and media that have traditionally defined environmental art, and introduces environmental art to a wide and diverse audience through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, readings, performances and conversations—in the process helping both artist and audience gain a deeper understanding of crucial environmental issues.

THE LAND's residency program is a unique resource for artists. Residents find the experience enriching, often in unexpected ways. Many have found it transformative, generating new ways of thinking about the environment, new forms to embody what they have discovered, and new and thought-provoking ways of bringing their ideas to others.