A Brooks Art Residency Programme

Sam NightingaleProjects

Big Bend Cowboys

I am very excited to be the first artist taking part in the A Brooks Art Marfa artist residency located in Marfa West Texas USA, taking place in September 2014.

During my three-week residency I will be working on a new project: Parallax Shifts: In Search of Imagined Landscapes.

The residency will give me the opportunity to engage with the real and imagined cultural history of West Texas and the High Chihuahuan Desert. The residency, which takes place close to the border with Mexico, is an area of significant frontier history: charged with myth, fantasy and visual representations that the era of Spaghetti Western films sought to imagine and disrupt. The location of the residency is key to this project as it was the very frontier or borderland of West Texas that many of the Spaghetti Westerns located their films – despite been filmed in Italy and Spain.

During the residency I will go in search of the landscape imagined in the Spaghetti Western to make a new body of work that will build on my practice of enlivening cinematic spectral spaces. I hope to explore these imagined landscapes – sites of indeterminacy (spatially and temporally) – through a process of artistic experimentation: journeying into the desert, exploring ghost towns that no longer exist (or ever existed) and making interventions into the landscape to reveal parallax shifts.

Read more about the residency.

More on A Brooks Art Marfa artist residency.