Hi-Desert Preserves

Hi-Desert Preserves is an edition of 29 landscape diorama jars containing sandy soil from the High Desert of Southern California, presented in the style of homemade preserves to explore the tension between preserving and possessing the local wilderness. The jars capture a portion of sand and open space, investigating notions of land ownership and stewardship – from Indigenous peoples to the Bureau of Land Management to Airbnb landlords – as well as the human longing to collect tangible evidence of the experience of a place, to hold on to relics of the ephemeral.

The project plays on midcentury novelty souvenirs: gag gifts such as Los Angeles “Canned Smog,” San Francisco “Canned Fog,” or Florida “Canned Sunshine.” There is also a tourist tradition of taking sand keepsakes from destinations like the Sahara or the Caribbean, although this practice is often outlawed (or even cursed, as in Hawai‘i).

It is prohibited to remove natural materials from Joshua Tree National Park or Mojave National Preserve – the sand contained in Hi-Desert Preserves is from adjacent private land. Suspended above the sand are sepia photo transparencies of High Desert landscapes, ghostly mirages that invoke nostalgia for a romanticized time before overdevelopment and gentrification. The repurposed commercial glass food jars are covered with homespun calico, tied with plant fiber twine, and hand-lettered, in a nod to Depression-era desert homesteading.

Made during a 2023 High Desert Test Sites residency at A-Z West in Joshua Tree, and sold at Sun Spot in the Sky Village Swap Meet in Yucca Valley