Category: hero

The Breaking Ring. The Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 2016. Installation, size variable.

The Breaking Ring ties together architectural and social aspects of wild horse culture in the American West. The installation includes a 24-foot breaking ring (gentling ring, round pen, etc.) made from regional hand-peeled Aspen logs. The ring hosts a diverse and carefully choreographed selection of public programs throughout the duration of the exhibition. Some of these include contemporary dance performances, qigong sessions, poetry readings, and community mahjong gatherings. The ring provides an ideal form to explore connective cultural links and foster activities centered around the horse breaking ring as a larger metaphor. Surrounded by the pages of An Equine Anthology (M12, Last Chance Press, 2015), The Breaking Ring faces all sides of wild horse politics and invites contemplation on social crossovers.

Lone Prairie. Corcoran Gallery, School of Arts and Design, Washington, D.C. 2018. 6-channel sound and video installation, 40 foot diameter.

Lone Prairie is a video installation by M12 that was first presented at the Corcoran Gallery, School of Arts and Design in Washington, D.C. from June 14 – September 10, 2018. The circular 6-channel sound and video installation is an immersive experience. Moving imagery and audio field recordings were collected in winter 2017 near the American High Plains town of Last Chance, Colorado, where M12 created a site-specific land work in a former agricultural field in 2015. The Last Chance Module Array is a ghost-like structure, akin to what Robert Smithson referred to as a “ruin in reverse.” Its forms are reminiscent of rural timber frame structures and pole barns. Alone in the landscape, they appear newly built or, just as easily, to have always been there, disintegrating over decades. The 2017 field recordings from the site are dubbed with pedal steel guitar by Chuck Lettes and the voice of Melanie Yazzie, who sings “The Cowboy’s Lament,” a nineteenth-century folk song more commonly referred to as “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” The installation creates a powerfully somber and contemplative environment in the midst of the Corcoran’s signature rotunda. Far away from the Last Chance Module Array and the High Plains, Lone Prairie is a multi-media eulogy to the agricultural Plains of the past century.

M12’s Lone Prairie Installation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
M12’s Lone Prairie Installation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
M12’s Lone Prairie Installation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
M12’s Lone Prairie Installation at the Corcoran Gallery of Art