Detail View: David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: Sand Creek

Price, Jonathan Reeve

2019

Sand Creek

The Communication Circle

Albuquerque, NM

Book Map

Atlas Map

61

61

(Accompanying poem by author) - The hills ahead, the swamp around us, this shallow, wide river unrolling past us—no one looking at us from the willow thicket, or the grey cliff beyond—no car, only the late afternoon sun shining like all the pieces of that mirror I broke at the master's house, glittering like birds settling on the rooves of our dear valley, our dead village. We are the ripples, not the flow. At night, we make our way across, not knowing how we will climb out, or crawl up some root, just pressing darkly on.

Copyright 2019 by Jonathan Reeve Price. For copies of the art work see https://www.museumzero.art/the-liquid-border For copies of the printed book see The Liquid Border: The Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, 2nd edition Copyright 2019-2020 by Jonathan Reeve Price Publisher: The Communication Circle 4704 Mi Cordelia Drive, NW Albuquerque, NM 87120 Second Edition: 2020 ISBN 10: 0-9719954-6-X ISBN 13: 9780971995468 80 pages https://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Border-Grande-Paso-Mexico/dp/097199546X/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_img_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=WQG4EDS3E1BKX1ES2J4V For a PDF of the book see https://rumsey3.s3.amazonaws.com/images/LiquidBorder2ndEditionB.pdf For the Artist's Statement see https://rumsey3.s3.amazonaws.com/images/JonathanPriceArtistStatement.pdf

Rio Grande

Rio Bravo del Norte

The Liquid Border: Sand Creek, 2019, Aluminum Print, 24"x24" (61x61cm), Jonathan Reeve Price, 30.6093, -104.9534

10420.005

5

Price, Jonathan Reeve

2019

The Liquid Border. A Museum Zero Exhibition.

Welcome I am exploring the liquid border—the imaginary line drawn down the middle of the Rio Grande as it passes between Texas and Mexico. Real, but invisible, the border floats away. But what pain comes across that unmarked frontier, what desperation, what determination! Exploring the photos and satellite data of this mighty river may help us imagine the people struggling across the river, and the trackers from the Border Patrol waiting on the American side. I live next to the Rio Grande. In summers, there are stretches of the river that go dry, drained to irrigate chile fields. But more streams pour in from Mexico, bringing the river back to life. It staggers as it gets near to the Gulf of Mexico, but persists. In the center of the river, we have no flag, no wall, no barrier. But our Border Patrol motors through in small skiffs, deterring migrants, and, quite often, picking up the bodies of people who went into the river, but could not swim. My neighbors go down to El Paso and cross on the Bridge of International Friendship, to buy antibiotics, get their teeth cleaned, celebrate with their cousins. Other folks came across long ago, and they are part of our community, not aliens. In fact, some families came here in the 15th century, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, passing for Catholic conversos, hiding out along this river, so far from the capital of Mexico, and the conquistadors, with their horses and priests. When I look at maps of the border region, I recall the stories of all these people going and coming, the voices of the young men looking for work, the cries of the families fleeing gangs in Latin America, and the children we pull away from their families to put into cages. I hear their words as I work. When there’s peace, the border can be invisible. But artists and politicians make it visible again. One example: To make the three-hundred mile Northern Irish border visible, Suzanne Lacy persuaded several hundred people to wear yellow, run horses through yellow pigment, and paddle around in yellow boats, leaving a yellow trail across the boundary that has been the cause of so much grief. She projected satellite maps marked with the yellow line onto the front of the Ulster Museum, in Belfast. For the stateless, the border is transcendent. Having been forced out of her homeland, Mona Hatoun says that she now feels rootless. But, she says, “The nomadic existence suits me fine, because I do not expect myself to identify completely with any one place.” Instead, she seizes on the maps that airlines use to show their routes around the world, photocopies them, and adds her own colored lines, and squiggles, emphasizing the journey, not the territory. Working on an iMac, I use a wide range of software to dig into LandSat Orbiter images, and U.S. Geological Survey topographical studies. I distort the original, useful, scientific images, taking them apart and rebuilding them with half a dozen applications, just to see what I can discover in the bitmaps, vectors, color palettes, and the spray of code. I struggle with the counterpoint of paint and pixel, the contrast between the prose label and the visual detail, the interaction between what we know and what we see. My prints are markers on the trail, not final destinations. I love the data. All those stacks of zeroes and ones add up to individual pixels, like dots of paint on a canvas, ready to be manipulated, distorted, shifted, and transformed. As I explore these artificial representations of the physical world, I get to view the scene up close, then far away; I soar to 30,000 feet, and then I wade through the reeds. As I zoom in and out through so many levels, I carve paths through the imaginary space, to lead attention on. My goal is to bring out the patterns in the natural landscape, the odd unnatural beauty of its digital representations, and the unseen souls struggling below. Compassion, then, and, yes, an odd joy. I want to give your eyes the pleasure of repeated visual tours, and, along the way, to lighten your spirits with tiny beautiful sparks. –Jonathan Reeve Price

10420.000

Artist Book

Regional Atlas

16

61

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Price, Jonathan Reeve