Leave No Trace (NS 000)

2019
5-channel HD video, color, sound; 28 min. Installation includes: 48 x 48 x 85.3 inch projection cube, faux skull, used tires and ratchet straps.

Installation view Leave No Trace, 2019, “Horizontal Vertigo: Negative Space,” Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany

Leave No Trace is the third episode in the Negative Space cycle. Referencing the principles of outdoor ethics by the same name, Leave No Trace explores land use and occupation with a series of vignettes in which performers work to resist containment and categorization.

As with A Smeary Spot, this work is staged in a black box theater and desert landscape. The potential of the void or ‘negative space’ is articulated against acts of construction and the grid as an organizing principle. Confronted with imposing boundaries, the performers work to allude the totalizing effects of standardized time and space.

In one scene, a solitary sundial constructed from an arch of speakers and theater lights simulates “felt” or natural time through synthetic means. In another scene, a performer carefully traverses a web-like scaffolding while singing about the approaching reality of technologically altered beings.

The scenes in the desert are filmed near Twentynine Palms Marine Base in California. Referred to as “Little Baghdad,” the military site is known for training marines in intensive war exercises. A performer wearing Chelsea Manning’s military jacket tresspasses the barbed fencing bordering the base while other perfromers assemble a makeshift stage from refuse near by. In an effort toreinterpret normative desire, a non-binary performer recreates artist Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Go-GoDancing Platform) (1991) on the stage.

The video is a 5-channel work projected onto the five visible sides of a cube. The cube is propped up on a human skull, a morbid nod to its use in the video to simultaneously represent presence and negation. Placed around installation are stacks of recycled car tires as seating, extending the environment of the video into the exhibition space.