John Saurer
Tenderland

John Saurer's ongoing investigation of the West, in multiple series, breathes the storied past and tenuous future of its fragile ecosystem. The work amplifies the myth-making, shifting culture and changing landscape that describe this evolution.

In Monuments, Saurer's delicate studies of western iconography — the Ponderosa pine, haystacks, and windmills — are branded with a hot stylus into mulberry paper. This exacting technique underlies the pervasiveness of fire in the West: on the land and its mark-making across it, on its people and their claims of ownership or ceremonies of appreciation. Isolating these iconic representations in vast negative space is lonely and vanishing. These monuments are fleeting.

Tender Land, likewise, feels forlorn: monotypes in gray tones, vestiges of seasons past. An installation of these small, square-format leaves, feathers and other western seasonal debris is well-ordered, but Saurer believes “all the subjects are then transformed through the process of inking, pressing and printing,” trash and leaf alike. The work straddles the line of artifact and memory.

In Loco-Motion, the artist's hand is most removed: the images are splatter effects from steel wheels riding endless miles of railroad track, spraying the undersides of grain cars. Saurer documents a landscape created by constant movement and continual “progress” — generations of colonization, industry and environmental impact, seen from the ground, looking at the underbelly of progress. Each series has been exhibited elsewhere, but this is the first time they are shown together, at the place of their provenance. They become richer because they have returned here.