Fred Mitchell
Southwestern Pedestrian
Southwestern Pedestrian is a meditation on the uncanny and sublime of the American high desert. This beautiful and otherworldly terrain is all at once a familiar and foreign landscape. This lonesome but crowded space is naturally bereft of suitable living conditions so it was manufactured to be inhabitable, thus creating a cognitive dissonance. This work explores that schism through juxtaposing constructed tableaus with the existing manmade environmental interventions. My practice involves utilizes observation, research, and construction to facilitate a dialog between these two types fabricated peculiarities. This visual discussion conjoins to make images of humor & regret, injury & absurdity, tangible & abstract and failure & achievement.