United Catalysts Desert Alliance

Mystery Ranch Artist in Residence 2019 — René West
Mojave

Wind, fine silt, dust and grit and digital gear do not go well together, so, I started using quart paint cans as pinhole cameras. I would nestle the cans down into the dust, under the boughs of the Joshua trees. With hand-drilled holes and long exposures, these primitive cameras captured the wind, the dust, the shapes, and even the heat of the desert. The low point of view and curved film plane conveyed the strangeness I felt in this landscape, and for me expressed a poetics of time and place.

I shot images in the mornings and spent the hotter portions of the day inside, processing negatives and drawing meditative mandalas. These circular geometric configurations began as abstractions but quickly transformed to contain desert animals conjured from journal entries and photographs shot on site. For me, this place was exotic, uncharted territory, a primordial forest of plants and wildlife that I had never encountered before.