Documenting the Desert
Kim Stringfellow finds wellsprings of inspiration in the Mojave Desert.
“Many landscapes are projections of culture, but the Mojave Desert really lends itself to being a kind of staging ground, a canvas for human activities.”
This story appears in the spring 2015 issue of 360:The Magazine of San Diego State University. Shortly after it was written, Kim Stringfellow received a Guggenheinm Fellowship for exceptional creativity in the arts.
If you see the desert as merely a desolate expanse between southern California and Las Vegas, Kim Stringfellow wants to adjust your focus. She is an artist, and the desert is her muse.
Stringfellow chronicles arid landscapes as a photographer, journalist, documentary filmmaker and cultural geographer, but she is no passive observer. Her transmedia art emerges from meticulous research about the connections between place and the people who inhabit it. At its most fundamental, Stringfellow’s work connects people and communities to the land they inhabit.
In 14 years as a faculty member in San Diego State’s University's School of Art & Design, Stringfellow has published books of text and photographs tracing the history of two desert phenomena—the Salton Sea ecosystem and an area near Joshua Tree National Park, where abandoned shacks mark one of the last tracts of land in the United States to be opened for homesteaders.
Now, she’s at work on her most ambitious undertaking yet. The Mojave Project will include up to 50 multimedia installments showcasing the desert and its communities, presented through audio, video and archival imagery created by Stringfellow and select guest contributors. It is funded by the California Council for Humanities in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“Many landscapes are projections of culture, but the Mojave Desert really lends itself to being a kind of staging ground, a canvas for human activities,” Stringfellow said. “The extreme environment of the desert is full of unique sites and unique voices because it hasn’t been colonized in the way our coastal environments have.”
The initial chapters of the Mojave Project render the region in fascinating details. There are stories of the transformation of Shoshone, a dying desert community, into a sustainable tourist destination; a retired professor’s discovery that creosote bushes in the Mojave have survived for thousands of years by cloning themselves; and the annual treasure hunt for water-soluble gems and crystals at Searles Lake, which first occurred in 1942.
These episodes have been aired on KCET, an independent public television station in Los Angeles, and can be found on the station’s website.
What the Mojave Project stories have in common is Stringfellow’s straightforward narrative style, which challenges stereotypes of desert life. For example, the installment on the treasure hunt, known as Gem-O-Rama, deliberately shifts focus away from the perceived blight of a desert community to the festive atmosphere of an event that attracts 3,000 visitors to the town of Trona (population 2,742).
The Mojave Project will culminate in 2017 as a large-scale video installation featuring the digital research journal, photographs, documents, maps, mineral specimen collections and other ephemera. More of Stringfellow’s work can be found at kimstringfellow.com
