Monument Valley 1999
The Wonderings's, show curated-text by Irene Bradbury, Great Eastern Street, London 2005
Condensed in the split frames of Monument Valley is a vision of the sublime. A vision, which to Judith Goddard is second-hand, one already depicted through found cultural and pre-meditated constructions. As Baudrillard describes, the vision of the American landscape surpasses the European norm not only in its grand-scale but that the drama of the desert was inherently cinematic before the birth of the cinema. In bleeding the image from monotone through to glorious technicolor, Goddard emphasises the resonance of the cinematic transition in film history, equally inspired by the mid American writings of Don DeLillo, then misread and promoted in the leisure phenomenon for those in search of the American Dream. In a painterly role Goddard frames what is a hugely mass-marketed and reproduced tourist panorama, and, in a celebration of Monument Valley, a geological wonder of the world, the pigment drains away and it is returned to the state of a monochromatic backdrop.