Michael Dax Iacovone
"Six Miles of Twine: Las Vegas Piece", 2023
Digital video, 23 min
Courtesy of the artist

Artist statement:

This work is inspired by Water De Maria's Las Vegas Piece. When De Maria was interviewed about Las Vegas Piece he talked about the difficulty in documenting the work, and how a photograph isn’t effective, because to really experience the piece you needed to spend time driving all the way out on a dirt road, then walking into the desert, then spend time walking the length of the piece. He figured it would take a person about four hours to experience the work. That resonated with me as someone whose work is based in process and labor because it spoke to the visceral experience of creating the work rather than what it looked like. I used his four hour time frame as a guide to create my reaction-based piece. For four straight days, I left Las Vegas at 4 a.m. to drive out to a remote location before the sunrise, then spent four hours experiencing a space. Each of the four days I made a walking drawing by using six miles of twine to draw out a diagram within the space. On the final day I recorded my drawing and edited the performance into a 24 minute video.