Category: hero

Rural Environments Archive (REA). Boulder, CO. Ongoing.

The Rural Environments Archive (REA) is an evolving collection of photographs and artifacts from rural place’s worldwide. Presenting matter of fact documents of budding rural life as well as neglect and abandonment, the collection covers a large variety of what makes up the rural. REA contains over 10000 photographs from Europe, Australia and the Americas along with additional objects such as tools, books, and other ephemera. If you are interested in contributing to the collection or would like to request additional information please email REA@m12studio.org.

Victory Means So Much. 21st International Art Biennial of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Mixed Media Sculpture and Sound Installation. 2019–2020.

Victory Means So Much provides a therapeutic light and sound environment for 32 regional fruit trees over the course of the biennale exhibition. The sound composition was made in a small agricultural town in the western United States and incorporates both original sound recording and a muzak dub of Stanley Turrentine’s “There’s Always Something There To Remind Me.” Victory Means So Much is a reflection on the complexity of the global rural environment and as a work asks us to contemplate the spatial and existential realities of domesticated soil agriculture and forestry.

C.L.U.I. Projects. Center for Land Use Interpretation, CLUI Wendover, Wendover, Utah. 2006-2008.

The Autotour Vehicle and Unit were completed during a residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation by the municipalWORKSHOP, an outrider to the M12 Collective. The Autotour Vehicle is a 4-wheeled, 6 person pedal-driven vehicle. Designed to support a GPS guided media tour of the Wendover area, the vehicle is equipped with a small computer and LCD monitor. Visitors to the CLUI facility in Wendover may check out the vehicle at anytime. The Autotour Unit is the support structure and housing for the pedal vehicle. The structure was built on site using primarily found and recycled materials. The walls and floor are constructed out of recycled pallets retrieved from area casinos. The Unit also supports a spring-loaded door for the easy entrance and exit of the vehicle and is outfitted with a solar-based power platform that keeps the vehicle continually charged and ready for action.

The C.L.U.I. Rover was created in collaboration with the art collective SIMPARCH and their project Clean Livin’. Located on the South Base of Wendover Airfield, the C.L.U.I. Rover transports 450 pounds of clean water to an artist research site daily. The vehicle is also equipped with solar power that runs a small water pump for moving water in and out of the storage tank. The power stored in the vehicle battery also powers a laptop computer, and audio and video recording devices that can be used for field research and recon missions by residents at the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

The Black Hornet. I-76 Speedway, Fort Morgan, Colorado. 2009. Dirt track racecar and environment.

From 2009 to 2013, M12 Studio partnered with the Hall family racing team in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Together, we created The Black Hornet, a dirt track racecar —one that in addition to being a legitimate race car operated as a connective object, threading art as performance event and participatory social action. The work explored cultural exchange at a country dirt track, far outside the city, far from any art institution. This project mobilizes collective knowledge in the broader rural sphere, and highlights M12’s “connective aesthetic” attitude and methodology—taking the art object past its basic level and insisting on part of its role as catalyst for cultural discourse. The Black Hornet was humble and slightly subversive. The racecar literally set a new pace for forms of cultural expression in rural communities. The M12/Hall family collaboration reveals the importance of intergenerational knowledge, gives value to notions of rural family and community, and sustains cultural livelihood beyond the metropolis and expected forums. In 2014, materials archived from the project were exhibited at the Galleries of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs, Colorado. An accompanying documentary video was also created.

Prairie Module No. 3. Reedsburg, Wisconsin. 2012.

Prairie Module No. 3 is sited outside of Reedsburg, Wisconsin and was commissioned by the Wormfarm Institute. This work continues our investigation of adaptive sculpture/architecture within a rural agricultural context. This is the third project in the series of large-scale cuboidal forms that connect with prairieland. The sculptural work has been designed to have a dual existence: one as a sculptural object in the landscape followed by its adaptation into a tractor shed on a local farm. This module is made out of cedar timbers and is whitewashed with milk paint made from ingredients sourced at an area farm.

The Luminary in Saint Louis

The Feed Store. Byers, Colorado. Building materials, social project. 2011–2017.

The Feed Store served as the base of operations for M12 from 2011-2017. Once a bank, post office, grocery store, and feed and ranch supply shop, the 4,000-square-foot building served as the M12 office, studio, workshop, and an experimental space for rural cultural activities. The importance of The Feed Store lies in its presence in small-town America, serving as a transcultural hub where disparate activities and people crossover. The Feed Store hosted over 200 artists, writers, researchers, and university students and shared their work with regional residents through exhibitions, performances and readings. The building was renovated in collaboration with the Art & Rural Environments Field School at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At last check, The Feed Store had tracked over 2000 visitors, was home to 20+ exhibitions, 15+ on-site projects in the region, and the proving grounds for 8 pressed records, 6 published books, and 5 collaborative working group summits.

Elder’s Hill. Kultivator Farm, Öland, Sweden. Earth form, root cellar, building materials. 2013.

Elder’s Hill is an on-site project by M12 (USA) and Kultivator (SE) located in Öland, Sweden. As a collaborative work, Elder’s Hill is emblematic of both M12 and Kultivator’s artistic practices, based largely around cultural exchange and intergenerational knowledge within a rural context. There are two main components to the work: a root cellar and an open-air classroom. Inspired by 19th century earth shelters built both in America and in rural Sweden, the structure is built using earth, stone, and wood with simple hand tools and materials readily available in the landscape. The root cellar performs as a learning collection, housing regional culinary traditions. The open-air classroom, located on top of the root cellar, is a space for social learning, sharing, and teaching by community elders. A roughly 70-year old fallen tree has been placed in the middle of the space to encourages further group learning and reflection on themes found within the work.

The Big Feed. Various locations. Social action and performance. 2007–2014.

Landing somewhere between a family reunion, potluck dinner, and symposium, The Big Feed was held each year from 2007 until 2014. The event served as a way to celebrate the regional landscape, experimental art and architecture, food, music, culture, community, and the emerging field of the rural arts. It was a forum to connect community members and artists in a casual atmosphere, as well as an opportunity for the larger public to learn more about the groundbreaking work presented by the attending community members, artists, musicians, and curators. A regional bison was traditionally roasted each year and all who attended also brought a dish. Hundreds of people performed, spoke, and even did magic tricks. Highlights included Vic Anderson the Yodeling Cowboy; architecture critic Mimi Zeiger; alt-country musicians Blue Mountain, Buckskin Stallion, Paul Burch, and 4H Royalty. Local citizens such as Tim Cullen and Ro Guenzel presented on topics as diverse as alien abductions and beer brewing. A special highlight of 2014 was the FFA livestock showcase and visits from the Washington and Arapahoe County Rodeo Queens.

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.