JENNIFER BOLANDE

In a cinematic experience animated by driving along Gene Autry Trail, viewers encountered a series of billboards featuring photographs of the mountains toward which they were driving. Each photograph of Visible Distance / Second Sight was unique to its position along this route, and at a certain point, as one approached each billboard, perfect alignment with the horizon occurred, thus reconnecting the space that the rectangle of the billboard had interrupted. In the language of billboard advertising, this kind of reading is referred to as a BurmaShave, after the shaving-cream company that used sequential placement to create messaging to be read from a moving vehicle. Within the desert empire of roadside signs, Jennifer Bolande chose to advertise the thing so often overlooked. Looking up at the billboards, our attention was drawn back to the landscape itself, pictured here as a stuttering kinesthetic of real and artificial horizons.

neville wakefield: To the extent that Desert X was a cartographic endeavor, it was identified with these nodal artistic experiences, but for me at least, the exhibition was also about interstitial spaces, the spaces in between, and the experience of the desert they offered. You were alone in choosing to actually operate in that space in between. Was that a conscious decision?

jennifer bolande: Yes. I have an abiding interest in things that are in transition or on the periphery of attention. This project draws attention to the transition between the built and natural environments, between direct and mediated experiences, between here and there, expectation and memory. Almost all of my work has to do with liminal spaces and works in the spaces between photography, sculpture, and cinema.

The project was sited in a transitional zone between wilderness, to the north, and civilization, the city of Palm Springs, to the south. Gene Autry Drive is a rather flat stretch of road that cuts across the Coachella Valley on a north-south axis and is a main artery from the freeway to the airport to points beyond. It’s heavily trafficked, yet in this mile-long stretch there is not much to see: no plants, no buildings, no pedestrians—just the road, a lot of billboards, and movement toward a destination.

The road to somewhere as opposed to the road to nowhere?

Maybe it is a road to nowhere! There’s movement toward a horizon that is continually receding. Moving through the desert ignites a desire to close the gap between here and there. It can be hard to know when you’ve arrived. The piece has

I was interested in the kinesthetic aspect of the work. In England, we call the windshield a windscreen. You experience a lot of the desert through this moving aperture.

I like that you use the word “kinesthetic” because, through my work, I want to make the experience of seeing almost palpable. Kinesthetics has to do with the bodily senses of movement and place. My piece for Desert X carries you through positions in space and through a set of experiential transitions from screen to frame to actual.

Approaching, you might be attentive to the GPS screen, or the landscape framed by the windscreen, as you call it, and then to the mountain pictures framed on billboards, then correlating the framed and unframed mountains, and finally viewing the mountains unframed, changing in relation to one’s own body and movement through space.

Coming to the desert, one has the sensation of leaving the frame or the usual set of frames and heading into the open, and yet the expanse of the desert creates a desire for framing.

It’s a Russian doll of framing, and so much of the filmic literature of the desert is about that—the framing of vanishing points. The same experience occurs at an individualized level, in the car, and it was important that people didn’t stop, right?

The distances in the desert are so great that it is really enjoyable to experience by car. I wanted to use the car to animate a movie composed of billboard frames. The alignment of the horizons occurs only for an instant, at fifty miles per hour, and then it’s gone; you have to let it go.

Were you aware of sequential advertising before the process?

Yes, but I think the idea came from the many times I’d driven on that road aware of the rhythm of the billboards and the anticipation it produced. You can’t help but look at each of them and look to see what comes next, even if the ad images were always disappointing.

After you invited me to consider the project and I drove around the Coachella Valley just looking, and finally when I had given up for the day and was driving home along that road, I noticed how I was always compelled to look at each billboard with expectation but immediately wished I hadn’t because they just seemed wrong. You observe the

preponderance of images of platters of shrimp on desert billboards—so incongruous and grotesque! In a flash, I realized what I would rather see on that array of billboards.

It’s interesting that the billboards were advertising nothing but the landscape. It was as if there was this moment of transparency. You had an equal surrealism, that overlay of landscape onto landscape, and that seemed important.

The photographs momentarily erase the billboards, reconnecting the space that the ads and the rectangle of the billboard interrupted.

In surrealism there’s often a kind of perceptual slippage; something moves from its usual position and becomes somehow other. I have always been a big fan of the double take—being asked to look again with disbelief or heightened attention.

I love the oscillation of perception between the pictured and the actual landscape that occurs in this piece.

There was spatial alignment, but there was also temporal alignment, because there was a time of the day that matched up as well.

The movement between images was as important to me as the images themselves.

Most of the photographs were taken early in the morning to get raking light from the east because I wanted the mountains to appear volumetric. Standing for an hour with my camera, I watched the light dramatically change the way the mountains looked. Of course the photographs could never look the same as the actual, even if it was at the exact same time of day. As you see the pictures on the billboards in relation to the landscape, it may trigger a memory of the way the mountains looked in the past, or an awareness of the continually changing conditions and appearances of things.

I think people want to go to the desert, but they don’t know how to orient themselves within it. The show was sort of a map that allowed for a kind of personal inquiry.

I think a lot about orientation in my work—how you situate your body in relationship to a given object or experience or image in order to understand. An interesting part of the project for me was the site-specific aspect of taking the photographs. It was a bit of a process, figuring out how and where to position myself to take the pictures, and quite different from the usual aesthetic and compositional choices that go into making a picture. It was as if the billboards themselves told me where I had to stand and how I had to frame each picture.

Mountains and other landforms look quite different from different perspectives. This is why people get lost in the desert all the time. I somehow hadn’t really understood this in a very deep way, and was maybe regarding landscape as fixed and framed, like a picture.

That is the disorientation of the desert and what makes one visually chase these horizons.

Were you surprised by people’s reaction to it?

I was quite surprised that people wanted to stop and to take a picture capturing the decisive moment of alignment. For some, this created a desire to recapture that moment. That the images of alignment went viral was a surprise to me as well. I think the documentation must have transmitted a virtual experience of the desires that desert travel elicits. That was different from the drive-by experience of the piece, but maybe close to my intention in another way.

I loved this comment that a friend sent me: “Laughed to watch a ‘movie’ by moving past a stationary image which was both a ‘western’ and a literal ‘road picture.’ A drive-by drive-in.”