This Land… began as a two-day performance during my residency at Ucross in Wyoming. Over the course of those two days, I constructed a 24 × 60-foot, four-strand barbed-wire fence across Piney Creek. The fence was temporary, but the labor required to build it was real. I drove the posts, stretched the wire, secured each strand, and physically divided a section of the landscape.
The act of building is central to the work. A fence is a relatively simple structure, but its meaning depends upon who builds it, where it is placed, and what it is intended to keep in or keep out. It can mark ownership, protect property, contain animals, establish a boundary, or prevent passage. In the American West, barbed wire also carries a history inseparable from territorial expansion, private property, enclosure, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
My own position within that history cannot be separated from the performance. I am a white male constructing a fence on land with a long history of Indigenous presence. I also grew up in the rural South, where the landscape carries its own histories of race, land, ownership, and violence. Building the fence in Wyoming brought these histories into contact. The work draws connections between the legacy of slavery and racial violence in the South and the ideology of Manifest Destiny that accompanied westward expansion, without treating those histories as interchangeable. Both raise questions about who has the authority to claim land, divide it, occupy it, and determine who belongs within its boundaries.
The physical labor complicates my relationship to those questions. I am not photographing an existing fence or representing one symbolically. I am the person building it. As the structure takes shape, open ground becomes divided ground. Piney Creek passes through the fence while the wire imposes a human boundary across the landscape. The completed fence exists simultaneously as a functional structure, a temporary installation, and evidence of the labor that produced it.
The title comes from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” with its familiar assertion that the land belongs to you and me. Placed against an actual fence, that assertion becomes more difficult. Whose land is this? Who determines its boundaries? Who is permitted to cross them? Who is kept out? The fence does not answer those questions. It makes them physical.
The histories within This Land… remain present in contemporary disputes over ownership, access, borders, resources, and land use. The fence is an ordinary object, but it is also a structure through which these relationships are enforced. Building it required me to occupy both positions: the person questioning the boundary and the person physically constructing it.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I acknowledge with respect that the land on which I created this work is situated on the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples, including the Cheyenne, Crow, and Lakota nations. Indigenous people continue to live in this region and practice their teachings and lifeways. This land remains an important place for many Indigenous peoples.
This work was supported by the Ford Family Foundation in conjunction with Ucross Foundation.