Polyopticon VI: The Childress House
Ucross, Wyoming
November 2007
The ‘Childress House’ is an unoccupied ranch dwelling surrounded by the rolling hills of the Powder River basin east of the Bighorn Mountains. During November 2007, Jackson converted parts of the interior into an evolving optical installation responding to the stark textures of the early winter landscape and the dusty rural dwelling decades out of use.
The dunn colors and changing weather and light of the late part of the year combined with the spectacular isolation of the place to give form to this piece. The cold quiet of the rooms in the abandoned dwelling and the dust, droppings, and other traces of transient use provided a projection surface that picked up and augmented the forms frojected from outside. Aged woodwork, cracked plaster, thin earth colored paint responded to the color of the hills and the sky.
While the sense of wear, isolation, and abandonment prevailed in the space on its own, Jackson used multiple horizons, reflections, and conflicts of scale to produce a fatastic, dreamlike landscape of multiple horizons and implied water bodies or islands in the sky. The changes in atmosphere, snow squalls and racing cloud shadows seemed to fill the room with living vapor the moved the imagination.
Thanks are due to the Ucross Foundation for generous support of this work.