Farmlab Public SalonKim Stringfellow and Chris CarraherFriday, May 22, 2009 @ NoonFree Admission

JACKRABBIT HOMESTEAD

About the Salon

Join Kim Stringfellow along with Wonder Valley artist, Chris Carraher, for a presentation of and discussion about the JACKRABBIT HOMESTEAD audio tour project.

Stringfellow and Carraher will discuss the history and contemporary landscapes of jackrabbit homesteading, specifically how the cabins resulting from the Small Tract Act have helped to foster the thriving creative community located throughout the Morongo Basin region where Joshua Tree National Park is located. Several tracks from the freely downloadable car audio tour available at www.jackrabbithomestead.com will be presented.

JACKRABBIT HOMESTEAD is a forthcoming book and web-based multimedia presentation featuring a downloadable car audio tour exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California's Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park. Stories from this underrepresented regional history are told through the voices of local residents, historians, and area artists—many of whom reside in reclaimed historic cabins and use the structures as inspiration for their creative work. Funding for this project was made possible, in part, by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities as part of the Council's statewide California Stories Initiative.

About the Salon Participants

Kim Stringfellow is an artist/educator residing in Los Angeles. Her work and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, audio, video, installation, and locative media. She teaches in the Multimedia area as an Associate Professor in School of Art, Design, and Art History at San Diego State University.

Her projects been commissioned and funded by leading organizations including the San Francisco-based Creative Work Fund, the Seattle Arts Commission, and the California Council for the Humanities. Her photographs and projects have been exhibited at the International Center for Photography (ICP), John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Rachel Carson Institute, 18th Arts Center in Santa Monica, and San Francisco Camerawork. International exhibits include Paisajes Toxicos at the José Martí National Library in Havana, Cuba and the Tallinn City Art Gallery in Estonia.

Her first book, Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905–2005 was published by the Center for American Places (CAP) in 2005 and was partially funded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She is currently working on her second book with CAP, Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938—2008, available in fall 2009.

Chris Carraher is a Wonder Valley, CA artist who uses a historic jackrabbit homesteading cabin as her studio. Her recent body of work, "The Plan: Claims of Territory in the High Desert," uses the cabins and the landscape they inhabit as subject.

She is actively involved in organizing cultural events incorporating the homesteading cabins as the event’s core theme. Carraher with two other Wonder Valley artists, Scott Monteith and Andy Woods, co-directed the Wonder Valley Homestead Cabin Festival in 2008 to showcase the work of area artists and performers whose work is inspired by the abandoned shacks. For more info: http://www.jackadandy.net/dandyhome4.htm.


Image courtesy Kim Stringfellow