Jesse Fleming's Desert (2010), was shot in California's Joshua Tree National Park, 140 miles east of Los Angeles. The park is over 1200 square miles of high altitude desert with bizarre geological features. Fleming lived remotely in the park for one month working between the uninhabited and habited landscape. He approaches this work as a disciplined observer: setting out to document life in the arid landscape and the intricacies that exist between the Desert's people and landscape. This catalog features a selection of photographs from the project Desert, along with images from the ethereal IT series (2010), distilling the content of Desert to shape, light, color, and atmospheric perspective. The resulting book is a hypnotic, sublime, and cryptic piece.

- Anat Ebgi

DESERT by Jesse Fleming

Printed for the occasion of the exhibition Desert, at The Company, March 12 - April 23, 2011

introduction by Anat Ebgi
interview by Amanda Law
photographs, sequencing, and book design by Jesse Fleming

"The desert is less nature than a concept, a place that swallows up boundaries. When the artist goes to the desert he enriches his absence and burns off the water on his brain... A consciousness of the desert operates between craving and satiety."
--Robert Smithson, excerpted from A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (1968)