Greetings all! This is the very first Shadow Mountain newsletter! Thank you for signing up!

Shadow Mountain is a brand new thing and a thing that I feel like I’ve been doing since I first picked up a skateboard in middle school. Skateboarding taught my friend Jody and me that loading docks and empty drainage ditches were the best places on earth. We learned that these hidden back areas of towns are autonomy sanctuaries–places where we could be left alone with our friends to throw snakes at one another in peace (I’ve given that up). These places also kindled our casual curiosity into an observational curiosity and a motivation to be even more curious, and find even more unmended fences to jump and oozing culverts to disappear into.

Shadow Mountain formalizes the joy I find in this synergistic commingling of wandering, wondering, and creativity I discovered through skateboarding and never seem to get enough of. Thank you, Jody^*. And, thank you skateboarding and artmaking.

And, thank you for joining me in this quest to find new ways and places, both inert and spontaneous, to kindle and re-kindle one another’s curiosities. Email is an unsatisfying medium for expressing gratitude, but it will have to do for now.

Why not come out to Hinkley, California, this weekend?

This Saturday, Feb 15th, I’ll be at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Desert Research Station. Come on out if you are in the southern California region and itching to wend your way to Hinkley, California. It is the last weekend of the CLUI’s Remote Sensing: Explorations Into the Art of Detection programming. 

At 1PM, I will share a short principal investigator talk, as will Julia Christensen, the Space Song Foundation, Deborah Stratman, and Steve Badgett. Also, a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge thank you to the Center.

In a way, this show is a sort of… proto-Shadow Mountain project for me. The idea for Shadow Mountain congealed a couple of months ago while driving over the Mojave River bridge in Hinkley while heading to the Home Depot for the thousandth time on the way to get some supplies for my radio tower and control room in the exhibit. The Mojave River is an ephemeral river. I can’t remember why that felt important at the time, but it really felt important, and a lot of things congealed about what I wanted Shadow Mountain to be in those few seconds I stared out the window of my truck at the almost-always-dry riverbed.

* Jody passed a few years ago. In one of our frequent and very teen moments of collaboratively thinking through who we were to one another and who we were to the world, he declared, “I think we can be Boy Scouts and also be skateboarding freaks.” I’m doing my best, Jody. I’m doing my best.