Two months ago, we drove to the high desert for an assignment, out to the Joshua Tree-Wonder Valley region, so I could spend a couple days meeting artists to ask them about making art in such an inhospitable place. Luckily, I met one gracious person after another, and each person introduced me to somebody or something else – studio visits, conversations over tacos, a late-night rock show in an old fire station in the middle of the desert. Until finally I was introduced to Kyle Simon, who graciously offered to pick us up one morning in his pickup truck and drive us out, eight or nine miles into the mountains, to see where he lived and what he had made.
The drive was on a dirt road potted and rutted enough to provoke indigestion. The sun was dazzling white. We were soon miles from municipal water service or power lines. So much boundlessness. So much silence. A seeming endless continuum of hills and sand. I managed to jot in my notebook: abyss of deep time? We rolled up and over creeks, past Joshua trees the height of houses. Some of the homesteader encampments we passed, fenced by corrugated iron sheets, had been there since the sixties, Simon said.
Where he lived, with his wife and daughter, was basically on top of a small mountain. They’d been there for several years, off-grid, powered by solar panels. A cabin of sorts was there when Simon acquired the property. He was constructing an addition with the help of a neighbor. And just below the house, he’d built a print studio in a Quonset hut, the first off-the-grid print studio I’d ever seen, at least operating at that level, considering Simon’s renown: artists from around the world often visited to make art and books together, amid all the adjacent harshness.
But it was the property’s other structure that had made him interested in the land in the first place.
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