Tag: american west

Keith Edmier
Fireweed
2002–2003
Vinyl over steel armature with attached vacuum-formed plastic leaves, cast urethane buds, cast dental acrylic petals, vinyl monofilament stamens and pistils; painted with lacquer and acrylic paint; dusted with volcanic ash from Mt. St. Helens, Washington, 1980.
Two sculpture parts: each 72 x 15 inches

FIREWEED

To create Fireweed, the artist dissected, cast, painted and reassembled plants he collected in the High Sierras. The flower petals are cast in dental acrylic. The sculpture was dusted with volcanic ash from Mt. St. Helens in Washington. Fireweed is an exceptionally colorful plant and grows from the sub-Arctic down to the Rocky Mountains and across the upper Midwest and down the Appalachians to Georgia. Each element of the sculpture represents a different stage of the plants reproductive development – one is female and one is male. The fireweed is one of the first plants to emerge after the landscape is incinerated by fire or volcanic eruption. This sculpture represents a body of work that “functions as a phoenix of sorts, a meditation on death and regeneration, sexuality, and the process of casting, itself.” (Edmier, 2003)

mythologyofblue:

“The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, through we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and lunge into canyons tangled up with watercourses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.”

— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Patricia Lockwood

Last thing she knew he lived in the west. When his name appears in her mind, it is written in lasso.

He always liked a good lie about storms, so here, when it thunders, a stampede of horses is flattening her son.

And in the morning her trails are washed away. The ground here is a dapple animal, it won’t stand still long enough to let her pull a bridle path over its head.

And where is the west now? She tugs down the map to look and it flies up again like a windowshade.

At the edge of the desert, she discovers a rich vein of Detroitite—a “stone” made of the layered paint that streams away from car factories. She takes a pickaxe and a shovel and begins to dig. She dynamites the color deeper and deeper. She lives away from home, she rides a gray donkey down, she eats sandwiches in the mine at night. It is her Grand Canyon, and she sleeps in a long silver river at the bottom. Above her, new layers keep arriving; they will run here from the other world as long as there is somewhere to go. Then the vein is inside out, and she wakes up one morning in her own bed again. The house is suddenly one floor deeper, she feels a room of basement rocks below her.