Category: 2015

Cool Pastoral Splendor. Last Chance Press and Jap Sam Books. 254-page field book and 7” vinyl record. 2015.

Cool Pastoral Splendor includes a selection of pictures from Richard Saxton’s Rural Research Archive and accompanying writings by Kurt Wagner. Saxton and Wagner are among a rare breed of artists focusing on the non-heroic, psychic, and lyrical unfolding of daily events. Both Saxton and Wagner infuse the work with their own rural experiences, but no single genre or culture captures the whole of these intentions. Cool Pastoral Splendor leaves us in search of beauty hidden in plain sight.

— Kirsten Stoltz, independent curator

Cool Pastoral Splendor  7” Vinyl Record
A side: Nice Without Mercy (cps mix) Kurt Wagner
B side: The Nashville Numbers System with Kurt Wagner

Available for purchase in mercantile

An Equine Anthology. Last Chance Press and Jap Sam Books. 254-page field book and 7” vinyl record. 2015.

An Equine Anthology stitches together non-linear histories, testimonies, and interpretations of equine culture from the American Southwest and beyond. Far from representing binaries of the romantic and mundane, of personality and commodity, An Equine Anthology presents the reader with a broad topographical view of the horse, an image that reaches well beyond that of American mythology. M12’s anthology combines poetics with research methodologies that delve into the unseen, hidden, and overlooked to create a work that is greater than the sum of its parts.

—Sanjit Sethi, former Director of the Santa Fe Art Institute

An Equine Anthology  7” Vinyl Record
A side: Blood Horse
B side: Hired Hand

Available for purchase in mercantile

Last Chance Module Array. Last Chance, Colorado. (Modules No. 4, 5). With Onix Architects. 2015-2016.

The Last Chance Module Array is part of M12’s Prairie Module series. The array is made up of two cubes that have been extruded to create a visual field containing a multiplicity of crosshatched forms. Despite its formal simplicity, the Last Chance Module Array contains many points of conceptual entry, from farm and ranch architecture to rural planning grids. The forms are reminiscent of rural timber frame structures and pole barns—their timbers having been finished with a Japanese wood burning technique known as Shou Sugi Ban, wherein cedar is burned to make the material more durable. The overall arrangement resembles a ghost-like structure, akin to what artist Robert Smithson referred to as a “ruin in reverse.” Alone in the landscape, it appears newly built or, just as easily, to have always been there, disintegrating over decades.

An ambivalent love song to the fading agricultural plains of centuries past, the Last Chance Module Array is a quiet complex for experiencing the subtlety of this site. A meditation on the High Plains region in Eastern Colorado in particular, the piece invites visitors to acknowledge their complex and often overlooked relationship to this place and to the environment, both built and “natural,” positive and negative. Positioned to align with the horizon and celestial phenomena, it is also an unapologetic celebration of the openness of this land, with the sun rising and setting in the center of the main module structure during the summer and winter solstices.