Bruce Myren is one of those lucky individuals whose terrific Kickstarter project has been fully funded, and he still has a month still to go…but Bruce still needs funds to fully complete a fascinating body of work that looks at the Fortieth Parallel across the United States. It allows us to travel across the country in a straight line, and experience the landscape through Bruce’s exquisite lens. This is a significant documentation of our country and I hope you consider backing his efforts.
Boulder, Colorado in the 1990s. My friend Eric and I were sitting on top
of Flagstaff Mountain gazing at the plains. I noticed that a road,
Baseline Road, went east in a straight line towards the horizon. Eric
explained that that particular road marked the 40th degree of north
latitude and was the baseline for the surveying the Kansas and Nebraska
Territory. At that moment, I knew I had a project: I was going to
document the 40th parallel across the whole country, creating a new
survey along this historic line.
investigates issues of place and space and boundaries and borders through the
exploration and employment of various locative systems. I am most interested in how macro
systems relate to micro experiences of land and landscape. My recent series include an
investigation of the Fortieth Parallel of latitude; a study of the poet Robert
Francis’s one-person house in the woods of Amherst, Massachusetts; and a piece
that documents the view from every place I have lived to where I live now.
with location-based systems and my work engages the nature of how humans
measure the world. I often use or
create rules to govern the location or approach in order to make a series of
photographs. This method
stems from my interest in maps and mapping, historical photographic surveys,
and conceptually-based art practices.
It is through these influences that I started to see and make pictures:
by measuring, coordinating, and locating myself within the world. Currently my work has been progressing from more universally
recognized ideas of place towards more personal re-presentations.
This important baseline was used in surveying state boundaries and creating townships and homesteads, and was a key marker in particular for the settlement the West. I am interested in the relationship between the 19th century’s understanding and construction of landscape, location, and place and our 21st conceptions. There are 50 confluences on land, with 2 at landfall on each coast. To date, I have been to 32 of the 52 sites; in the June 2012, I launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the finishing of the project.