Motel Room
For my job I travel hundreds of miles every day, yet arrive nightly in what feels like the same place. I greet the uniformed desk attendant and check in. I swipe the keycard to unlock my room. I doze off within a few hours, resting before another day of the same thing. Occasionally I’ll notice something: a loud carpet pattern, an awkwardly-placed doorstop, an exceptionally gurgly mini-fridge. In these moments I can’t tell whether I’m awakening from my trance or sinking deeper.
Motel Room is a meditation on the repetitive smoothness of the US motel. Through text, images, and audio recordings we investigate attenuation—the perceptual reduction of a repeated or sustained signal—as an aesthetic phenomenon in its native environment.
Site: Robbers Roost Motel
OCTOBER 9, 2015 - OCTOBER 12, 2015
High Desert Test Sites heads to Green River, Utah for our next “big” event, HDTS: Epicenter.
Following the epic HDTS 2013 event, which took us on the road to Albuquerque, New Mexico, we are turning our focus in 2015 to the communities and contemporary art programs in rural Utah. For our next event we will be partnering with Epicenter, a Green River-based organization founded in 2009 by a group of architectural designers, in the spirit of Samuel Mockbee’s visionary Rural Studio. We are inspired by the energy and vision at Epicenter, and by the ways in which they provide resources to local residents through active involvement in their intimate community.
HDTS: Epicenter is a collaborative curation of artists’ projects, along with many regional points of interest and programs in diverse locations in and around the rural Utah community of Green River. Participating artists include:
Steve Badgett
Cabin-Time
Alyse Emdur & Michael Parker
Butchy Fuego & the Seeing Trails DFA (Division of Fine Art)
Kathleen Johnson & Mark So
Alison Kinney, Daniel Nickerson, Cyrus Smith & Matt Takiff
Nicole Lavelle
Charlie Macquarie
Allan McCollum
Jordan Topiel Paul & J. Gordon Faylor
Ephraim Puusemp, Kiersten Puusemp & Raivo Puusemp
Bennett Williamson
