Projecting Artlies into the Void

In 2006, Land Arts of the American West was asked to create an ARTL!ES ‘archive’ at Cabinetlandia, a borrowed piece of land near Deming, New Mexico. The site is part of the Deming Ranchettes, desert scrubland throughout Luna County that was speculatively divided into 87,000 half-acre residential lots and sold in the 1960s. Bound by a major east-west railroad to the north, the voided subdivision containing our site is bisected by Interstate 10. Its original dirt roads have become faint shadows tracing property lines across an expanse of open horizon. This seemingly empty Chihuahuan Desert basin appears as a zone to traverse on your way between places. Void is the essential character of this place. Its transient nature and the ambulatory mode of Land Arts investigation prompted a dispersed response to the project. Instead of making a static container, our goal was to locate the actual issues within the landscape and archive the stories, or lies, returned in that exchange. After considera