Matt Coolidge and CLUI

Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is one of the strangest and most relevant operations about land in the United States.

The CLUI Land Use Database is an on-line computer database of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States. It is a free public resource, designed to educate and inform the public about the function and form of the National landscape, a terrestrial system that has been altered to accommodate the complex demands of our society.

Below is a brief portrait of CLUI and its founder, Matt Coolidge, courtesy of KNME New Mexico.

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Catherine Harris and Land Arts of the American West UNM

The video below is an example of the kind of work done in Land Arts of the American West at the University of New Mexico. It is a collaboration led by Catherine Harris, professor of Art and Ecology in the Department of Art and Art History at UNM. Harris demonstrated measuring space through comparative body/landscape studies such as stride patterning, using the lower leg as a transit level, and line of sight spatial marking. Harris worked with Land Arts students to develop the project, Transect Collaborative, which involved walking a transect line across Lobo Canyon, documenting it via drawings, photographs, and video, then developing a gallery installation.



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NM

new mexico, website, psychology

i'll be going to new mexico in 36 hours. this trip comes to me in a month of reflection about my direction in art and life. i've been diligently painting on canvas for the past 6 months, and my assessment is that i still have a long way to go before i'm doing what i want to be doing. and as i write this i think to myself, "i don't know why you can't just do what you want to do." one response to this is that if everyone were able to do what they wanted to do, everyone would presumably be satisfied. and i know that there are many, many people who are not satisfied. so doing what you want to do is probably easier said than done. in any case, i believe my efforts have gotten me closer to what i want to be doing, so it hasn't been time wasted.
my website will be launching in a few days. there are some details still to take care of, and we'll probably be tweaking it even after it is made viewable to the public. the process of creating a website, even while the burden of this has fallen on my generous friend, Jody Tate, has enabled me to gain some perspective on my work in a way i didn't have before. i've always known my work to be heavily grounded in process, but the psychological angle of my work is just now becoming apparent. i think you sense this in some of my performances from grad school where my actions could be described as "futile". the promised land drawings, i think, are also psychological in the way they appear to be a view of some unknown viewer into unknown surroundings.