Chelsea Dean. Remnants of Ambition. Shoebox Projects. Photo Credit Kristine Schomaker

Mining the Mojave for Art: Chelsea Dean’s Remnants of Ambition

By Genie Davis

It would be hard to underestimate the appeal of the desert as an artistic mecca. The vastness of the landscape, the shifting light, the vast horizons, and the lack of what passes for civilization or the ruins thereof is the stuff of magic to me. Ghost towns, abandoned shacks and mines, rusted trucks, and discarded furniture, the left-behinds of those who came, who stayed, who departed again, perhaps defeated by the vastness, the heat, the dryness, the sheer emptiness they could not fill – it’s a mystery the mind wants to explain, a story that no one but the vicissitudes of time and weather can account for.

It was with great anticipation, then, that I viewed the culmination of Chelsea Dean’s artist-in-residence exhibition at Shoebox Projects…