||||

A Desert Odyssey

Imagine: you wake up, open your eyes in blinding light and find yourself on the slick surface of a dry, prehistoric lake. The shore is about 40 miles away. Everything around you is white, as far as your eyes can see. The sun creeps up from behind a jagged horizon. Not another living soul around, just heat, wind and deafening silence. Or so you think.

From 1999 through 2004 Dutch artist Roderik Henderson and his wife Tanja (and later also their daughter Fay, who was born during their travels) roamed the North American deserts continuously as photographing nomads: a journey through world's ultimate void, searching for the lucidity of naked rock and burning sand. No thoughts, no dreams, no ambitions - only absolute, sublime nothingness. For five years the salt flats, arroyos and lava fields were what they called home.

But Henderson's naive search for a desert Arcadia soon turned into a photographic inventory of traces of recent human activity in the deserts of Nevada, California, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and West Texas. A dusty trip through a scorched land of super malls, ground zeros and unfriendly skies. The world now is a different one than the one he left behind five years ago, but the halo of modern times arose at the horizon as a frightening fata morgana at every turn.

The landscape in "A Desert Odyssey" is a mental wasteland, where empty billboards greet you with the same sinister significance as the god-fearing, doomsday alerts on gigantic, pitch-black street signs along the roads in Tucson, Arizona. Or, where off road fanatics carved a piece of abstract artistry of monstrous dimensions into a sensuous landscape of bald, grey, fragile hills, as in the badlands around Caineville, Utah. Or, where an Inter Continental Ballistic Missile swirls up the sky with the same apparent trivial pettiness as a smoke ring from a cigarette, as in White Sands, New Mexico. Or, where God is depicted as a worn out, sunbaked tire, as in Amboy - Mojave Desert, California. Or, where the landscape has been transformed into the cratered surface of a faraway planet, as in Department of Energy's Nevada Test Site, where the nuclear weaponry of world's most powerful superpower has been experimentally blasted to smithereens. Or, where a burned out yacht roasts on a parking lot in Las Vegas, Nevada in July. Or, where half made beds, and dirty dishes in an abandoned house are emphasizing the absence of people so dramatically, that these trivial artefacts change into trophies of anti-existence - like deep black holes in a typically domestic setting, as in the high desert of Eastern Nevada, where a small, obscure community is depicted as part of the "down winders" society because of the radioactive fallout from hundreds of nuclear weapons that have been detonated 300 miles away in Southern Nevada.

Henderson's desert is grim and gritty: the vast, austere landscape, the atom bomb craters, the ICBM's, de endless highways, the products of consumer culture scattered across the desert like domestic fall out. "A Desert Odyssey" depicts the world as a silent place where no values exist, because this is a humanized world without humans. Here, civilization is just a greasy residue that sticks on everything that ever was.

January 2005