Embodied Exploration with Land Arts of the American West

Image of working at Spiral Jetty, Rozel Point, Utah.

Working at the Spiral Jetty, Rozel Point, Utah, 9 Sep 2012.

Lecture by Chris Taylor
Tuesday 12 February 2013 at 6:30pm
Education Building (EDU) TECO room 103
School of Architecture and Community Design
University of South Florida
Tampa, Florida

Taylor will talk about the embodied experience accumulated within the last ten years of Land Arts of the American West, the transdisciplinary field program he directs at Texas Tech University that investigates the intersection of human construction and the evolving shape of the planet. Land art or earthworks begin with the land and extend through the complex social and ecological processes that create landscape. Encompassing constructions that range from petroglyphs to roads, dwellings, monuments and traces of those actions, earthworks show us who we are. Examining gestures small and grand, Land Arts directs our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and track in the sand, to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military-industrial installations. Land Arts is a semester abroad in our own back yard investigating the American landscape through immersion, action and reflection.

Chris Taylor is an architect, educator and the Director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University. From this field-based incubator of teaching and research he has published two books on the forces within arid lands across the Americas, bridging the Atacama in Chile with the desert southwest of North America. He is currently working to create the Great Salt Lake Exploration Platform funded in part by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Taylor is a graduate of the University of Florida and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.