Artists Amy Balkin and Kim Stringfellow will present "Invisible 5", an audio mapping of the natural, social, and economic histories along Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Join us for a virtual road trip through California's Central Valley.
Amy Balkin utilizes research in works that consider how people interact with, and impact the social and material landscapes we inhabit. These projects include This is the Public Domain, an ongoing effort to create a permanent international commons through the legal transfer of 2.634 acres of land purchased for this effort, to the global public. Public Smog is a public park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale, constructed through a series of economic and political activities and gestures. Her most recent work is Sell Us Your Liberty, Or We'll Subcontract Your Death, a series of large-format rubbings taken from architectural signage of San Francisco Bay Area entities self-implicated in war profiteering, illegal spying, remote sensing, and the local, everyday production of war. She was a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007.
Kim Stringfellow's work investigates environmental and historical topics related to land use through hybrid documentary forms incorporating a variety of media, including photography, film/video, audio, installation and Web-based interactive multimedia. Project commissions include Salmoncity.net (Seattle Arts Commission) and Safe As Mother's Milk: The Hanford Project (Cornish College of the Arts, Arts + Activism series). Exhibitions include Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center for Photography in 2006/07. Her first book Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005 was published with the Center for American Places in 2005.
Matthew Coolidge is the director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The CLUI takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of land use, drawing on the natural sciences, sociology, art, architecture, and history. The Center maintains an online database of unusual and exemplary land use in the United States, publishes books, operates a residence program and interpretive site in the salt flats of Utah, exhibits in national and international venues, and conducts public tours. Coolidge teaches in the curatorial practice program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Books include Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to the Nation's Nuclear Proving Ground. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship (2005), and the Smithsonian's Lucelia Artist Award (2006).
