Author Archives: Kris Timken

Amy Balkin’s work addresses a fundamentally American question: Who owns the land? She’d once envisioned a desert Eden that would belong to all human beings but quickly discovered that there is no legal construct in the United States for a … Continue reading →

  In her fascinating work America Ponds, Sarah Kanouse inhabits a unique version of the character of the explorer. This artist’s version of a naturalist is distinct in that one has “a skewed vision of what that world might be, … Continue reading →

Cynthia Hooper’s passion for infrastructure is palpable. She is a self-described “infrastructure geek.” Trained as a painter, Hooper applies a formal aesthetic approach—emphasizing light and color—to her video work. The project we discussed is a collection of videos about water … Continue reading →

Artists and creative types are often looking for an idea with legs: something that can adapt and evolve to carry forth an enduring theme. With the Marking Deep Time Studio, the legs are everything.   Conceived in 2011 by smudge—a … Continue reading →

In American mythology, the settlement of the West was the story of hardy pioneers scratching out rugged new lives, though in reality, by the time most pioneers arrived, much of the western landscape was owned and developed by agricultural and … Continue reading →

“I needed to find a reason to be in those landscapes, because they have been photographed so many times before that just taking a photograph of them was not enough,” Allison Davies explained as she looked at the mysterious figure … Continue reading →

In a 2011 issue of the New, Yorker Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo discussed with writer Elizabeth Kolbert the possibility of a gene that might explain why modern humans (as distinct from Neanderthals) began, as he put it, “venturing out on … Continue reading →

Camille Seaman does very little research before taking her journeys—she just goes, usually with no idea of what to expect. Her first trip to “the ice,” as she calls it, was a serendipitous one.   In 1999, she agreed to … Continue reading →

Of all the artists’ projects featured in The New Explorers, the one the book begins with, Rachel Sussman’s The Oldest Living Things in the World, is one of the more unusual. For more than a decade, Sussman has traveled all … Continue reading →

If there is no geographic territory on earth left to discover, are explorers obsolete? In the twenty-first century, the farthest reaches of the earth have been surveyed, mapped, and photographed. One could argue that our planet is now in a … Continue reading →