Time Lapse

Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality published in 1937 by New York socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan exemplifies a late modernist disillusionment with "civilized" culture and class. Luhan, who had set up salons of notable writers, artists and authors in Florence, Greenwich Village, and later Taos New Mexico, gave up her prior fictions to re-claim life on the edge.While the image of desert can mean many things to many people, it has been said that easterners in particular conjure primativist notions of an exotic nature and its rural inhabitants.

Such was the case with Mabel Luhan. Yet, her utopian vision did lure D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe to the desert and win her the respect of photographer friend Ansel Adams. The video project "Escape to Reality: 24hrs @ 24fps" borrows narrative elements from Mabel Dodge Luhan's memoirs combining them with the poetry of Palm Desert resident Ruth Nolan, images from Eadweard Muybridge's 1870s Palo Alto motion studies, post-modern music, tourist travelogues taken in New York, California, and Pearl Harbor in 1930s, along with the images of photographers who roamed Joshua Tree National Park for a 24-hour period in May 2008.

Escape to Reality montages time periods and styles marking the transition between East and West, day and night, sophisticated urbanity and isolated desert, class comfort and new realities, war to peace, still camera to cinematic, from analog film to digital device. Join us for a reception and screening, November 6th, 6:00pm www.artsblock.ucr.edu digitalstudioinfo@ucr.edu rsvp at: 951.827-4796