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Habiting the Arid West: Michael Light, William Fox, Charles Hood
February 22, 2020 @ 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
FreePlease join us to celebrate the publication of Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville, a collection of extraordinary aerial images by photographer Michael Light, featuring essays by William Fox, Charles Hood, and Leah Ollman, recently released by Radius Books of Santa Fe.
Michael Light will speak about and show work from the new book; writers William Fox and Charles Hood will respond to Light’s work, as well as giving brief presentations about new books of their own, on such subjects as the artist Michael Heizer, and the mammals and birds of California.
Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville is the fourth volume in Light’s aerial survey, Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West, which “journeys into the vast geological space and time of the Great Basin — the heart of a storied national ‘void’ that is both actual and psychological.”
Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville exists both as a dos-a-dos (back-to-back) trade book, and as a pair of very large scale (37 x 45 inch) artist’s books, bound by hand in editions of ten copies. These two artist’s books will also be on display at Passages Bookshop from February 22 through March 28.
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PARTICIPANT BIOS
Michael Light is a San Francisco–based photographer focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. He has exhibited extensively worldwide, and his work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Research Institute, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others. For the last sixteen years, Light has aerially photographed over settled and unsettled areas of American space, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime. A private pilot and Guggenheim Fellow, he is currently working on an extended aerial survey of arid America titled Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West, published by Radius Books; the first three volumes in the series were Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack (2009), LA Day/LA Night (2011), and Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain (2014). Light is also widely known for his archival works Full Moon (1999) and 100 Suns (2003).
The writings of William L. Fox constitute a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. His numerous nonfiction books rely upon fieldwork with artists and scientists in extreme environments to provide the narratives through which he conducts his investigations. Last year Monacelli Press published Fox’s Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments, the most comprehensive account of Heizer’s work to appear to date. He also serves as the Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. Fox has authored essays for numerous exhibition catalogs and artists’ monographs, and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Poet and naturalist Charles Hood has been a dish washer, a ski instructor, a birding guide in Africa, and a Research Fellow with the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. His recent books include Mouth, Partially Excited States, and A Californian’s Guide to the Birds Among Us. He lives and teaches in the Mojave Desert.