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.
