DEVIN FARRAND: WALK ME HOME

Ethereal, luminous, contemplative, and timeless, the works presented in Walk Me Home consider the physical spaces and cognitive distance between the artist’s two studios: a remote cabin in the Pioneer Mountains of central Idaho and a warehouse in the vibrant yet chaotic urban landscape of Los Angeles. Driving back and forth with the seasons, Farrand finds introspection and influence in the vast array of open expanses—spaces that appear absent of humans yet alive and flourishing with wildflower patches, streams, wildlife, and the smallest traces of passersby, all vibrate under panoptic skies. Living between these two extremes has captured Farrand’s imagination and focus.

Thinking of one environment while moving through another, Farrand cultivates his position on the horizon—an idea of a place that can never be reached yet engenders endless possibility. Placed with cadence throughout the gallery, each of Farrand’s Horizons consist of stacked horizontal plates that evoke a landscape without rendering one. An abstraction of land and sky, near or far, dusk or dawn—is created when anodized aluminum fields of brilliant blues, evergreens, sunset yellows, or cornflower purple petals are anchored by the rainbow reflections of yellow zinc plated or polished black steel. Sometimes sandblasting atmospheric energy or windswept marks onto one half or another, Farrand’s Horizons realize the sublime through juxtapositions of matter.

At the center of Walk Me Home, surrounded by a garland of Horizons stands a welded steel fence post—a transposition of an artifact carried back from traversing across land stewarded by the Bureau of Land Management. Fixed points that zig zag through the landscape, fences are made from the simplest means to outline space or property. On long drives in or out, Farrand watches wooden posts repeat rhythmically—unremitting markers of time and location, graced by idiosyncratic characteristics like twists, nails, knots, indentations, or splinters. Farrand’s homage to these posts is modeled after one he salvaged on a hike and is accompanied by a second sculpture—a soapstone beer can resting atop a marble salt lick. As the landscape breaks down  markers of boundary and weathers cans left behind, the cows on the open range lick a perfect block of salt down into curvaceous hollowed forms—in the ethos of erosion, Farrand carves away parallel objects from stone. Ambient and angular, these two sculptures form a fulcrum amongst the infinite Horizons.