CHRIS ENGMAN: The Pursuit

Chris Engman's "Pursuit" is a 9 1/2 minute video of a map being blown by the wind across the La Playa flats in Death Valley, California.  With his camera mounted to the front hood of his pick-up truck, Chris Engman tracked the map for 31 miles (originally intended to be 50)—until his truck got stuck in the mire.  Without cell phone reception or anyone else around to help him, he hiked back the 31 miles for assistance.  The video adheres to Engman’s working methodology, giving the viewer a front seat to the process with the intention of allowing them to perceive and experience the work as he did.  Pursuit is a mesmerizing, poetic work.  As in some of the earlier works that Engman created in the desert of eastern Washington State, the site of Pursuit has “a psychologically charged but neutral energy, like an unformed dream or empty canvas waiting to be acted upon.”  Further, it addresses the themes that continue to provoke and capture his imagination: grandeur and the ordinary, struggle and futility, illusion and disillusionment, life and death—and examines the most fundamental of issues:  the ungraspable experience of time and the illusive and unknowable nature of reality.