SCOTT ROBERT HUDSON
Artist / Curator

Projects
Bison
Effigy Mound
Wild Horses
Meteor Shower
Wood Sculpture
Mollusk
Font de Gaume Drawings
Trees
Mt Shasta
Landscape as Witness/
    Reconcilation
    (In development)

The Great Flood
    (In development)

Blythe Intaglios
Blue Lines
Spirit In A Cave

Text
Conversation on Art
    and the Immanent:
    w/ Raymond Barnett Ph.D.

Conversation on Art and
    Environmental History
    w/ Amahia Mallea Ph.D

Bison Project Narrative
Effigy Mound Narrative
Wild Horses Project Narrative
The Making of Demoke
Mollusks Project Narrative
Font de Gaume
    Project Narrative

Lava Beds
Landscape as Witness /
    Reconcilation
    Project Narrative

    (In development)
The Great Flood
    Project Narrative
    (In development)

Blythe Intaglios
    Project Narrative
Blue Lines
    Project Narrative
Keith Lebanzon and the
    Bobcat Brush

What I did on the 10 Year
    Anniversary of 911

The June Beetle
Spirit In A Cave
Sovereignty of Content

Biography
Vitae & Chronology

Contact
srh.sculpture@cfu.net

WILD HORSES
 
Horse Skulls, Acrylic Paint, and Wood
2013

Exhibited at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery, July 19, 2013

 
Prelude to an Idea
 
In January 2009, I participated in an exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno titled Between Grass and Sky. The night of the opening I was joined by my long time outdoor adventure partner, Phil Johnson. The next morning Phil and I drove north past Pyramid Lake and the town of Gerlach and into the heart of the Black Rock Desert.
 
We made camp at Mormon Dan at the base of the Calico Mountains. Our camp looked down on the Playa eight miles across the vastness to Black Rock Point and a body of water to its south. Since it was January, with the exception of some distant, discreet campfires, we had the place to ourselves. This is notable because out in the vastness of the playa is the location of the Burning Man Festival. In the autumn the playa will be host to a community of around forty thousand people gathering to celebrate primal impulses.
 
 
Black Rock Discoveries
 
The first day Phil and I hiked up to the ridgeline of the Calico Mountains and summited the peak that looked down upon our camp. On the hike up, we observed a scattering of the legendary wild horses in the distance. I found an isolated pocket of unusual rocks that I can only describe as an opaque, milky white form of Chert. On the hike down we saw more wild horses but much closer. One of the horses crossed a small drainage and then galloped directly towards us, pulling up maybe one hundred feet away and flared its nostrils. It was an exquisite animal making a clear statement.
 
The next morning we began an eight mile one way hike across the playa to Black Rock Point. In the scrub margin that borders the playa, Phil mused about prehistoric Lake Lahonton that formed the Great Basin. We encountered numerous fragments and flakes of obsidian that were testimony of early Pre-Columbian inhabitants. We broke out of the scrub and onto the alkaline, shimmering flatness of the playa. Being on foot in the heart of the empty playa is a sensation unlike anything I had experienced. It reminded me of being out at open sea.
 
Somewhere in the middle of the playa, a flock of around twenty Horned Larks flew directly over us. As we neared Black Rock Point, we were surprised to encounter a frozen wetland ringed by a field of mud domes. A short distance away, Phil thought he could see steam rising and it was there that we discovered a perfect hot spring the size of a large pond. Nearby was an old wooden wagon with weathered grey benches and wooden hoops. I have since learned the wagon was abandoned by a sheep herder in the 1940’s. We sun dried ourselves on the wagon benches after a long soak in the hot spring.
 
 
Eohippus
 
When I encountered the wild horses near the ridge summit of the Calico Mountains, I knew immediately that I had stumbled upon a vital theme for a new project. When I returned home, I began researching the natural history of the wild horse herds.
 
I was surprised to learn that the prehistoric ancestors of the modern horse (Eohippus, Mesohippus, etc.) originated in North America during the Pleistocene. After a period of evolution, they migrated to Eurasia where they had not previously existed. It was in Eurasia that they evolved into Equus, the modern horse while at the same time becoming extinct in North America. It is perverse to me that the Spaniards arrived in the New World in the 16th century and returned the descendents of Eohippus to their place of origin. Wild herds were re-established in North America virtually upon contact. These Federally protected herds are now at the center of a complicated environmental controversy.
 
Hiking among the wild horses in the Calico Mountains, I was well aware of the many horses that are depicted in the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in Southern France. In June 2012, I spent a week in Les Eyzies France where I made multiple visits to the caves at Font du Gaume and Combarelles to experience cave art first hand. I knew that these discoveries where granting me access to the earliest chapter of artistic expression.
 
 
The Ghost Dance
 
While hiking across the empty playa of the Black Rock Desert with Phil, I had a second more challenging realization. I realized that I was very near the birth-place of the historic Ghost Dance.
 
The Ghost Dance religion was founded by the Paiute prophet Wovoka at Walker Lake, just south of Reno. In the 1890’s, after the turning point in the great Indian wars, the religion spread east of the Rocky Mountains and found particular resonance with the Sioux. They were facing the end of their cultural identity and many turned to this new religion. They believed that if they danced with enough fervor, it would produce a climatic rapture event. This caused great anxiety with the settlers, missionaries and reservation agents. The government’s persecution of the Ghost Dance was responsible for the murder of Sitting Bull and the Massacre of Big Foot's band at Wounded Knee.
 
 
Set in Motion
 
In January 2010, I produced and exhibited the first prototype assemblage of the Wild Horses project at the Anderson Gallery at Drake University. I had to begin by locating and procuring a wild horse skull. A friend at the Nevada Museum of Art put me in touch with a gentleman that went by the name Metric. Metric located a skull in the playa and shipped it to me for a meaningful donation to the Friends of the Black Rock Desert.
 
I knew I wanted to mark the horse skulls in some manner and saw this as an opportunity to reference the Plains Indians and the Ghost Dance. The first idea I had was to research the Indian face paint as depicted by the artist George Catlin in the mid 1800’s. For the prototype, I chose the vivid alizarin red with green streaks worn by White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas portrayed by Catlin in 1845. For the body of the assemblage, I simply surfaced a snaking length of Eastern Red Cedar wood with a gouge.
 
From the beginning, I intended for this prototype to create an opportunity to produce a herd of at least twenty of these assemblages to evoke a performance of the Ghost Dance. I produced a rough sketch of a large spiral of these assemblages curling into an implied circle. The spiral would create a passage for viewers to access the center of the vortex.
 
 
Gathering Horse Skulls
 
In August 2011, I set out to gather a large number of horse skulls for the comprehensive installation. Following a friend’s advice I started purchasing horse skulls one at a time on eBay. As they arrived, I marveled at their variety. I received one that was enormous and clearly from a draft horse. The next day I received one that was even bigger. Then I received two very small skulls that were clearly from colts. I paid a double for a skull that has a deformity of a shrunken, offset eye-socket. I wanted this one to be the trickster of the grouping. The trickster, common in many cultural mythologies, defies convention and personifies otherness and creative chaos.
 
 
Magpies and Ants
 
I continued my research for designs to mark the horse skulls. I found the Native American face paint depicted in George Catlin’s portraits interesting but limited. It was then I remembered that the Ghost Dance Shirt was a specific class of artifact. As I researched these garments, I began to notice that many were designed with images of birds and turtles. I noticed that many of the birds, with their long tails and black and white pattern, were clearly Magpies. Magpies are present in the plains region, yet seemed to have no particular significance to the Indians there. The Magpie as a symbol was adopted by the plains tribes as a reference to Wovoka, the Paiute founder of the Ghost Dance religion.
 
I thought about what to do with the trickster skull with the deformed eye-socket. Reading first person accounts of the massacre at Wounded Knee, I learned about the medicine man Yellowbird. By nearly every account he incited the tragedy. As the Seventh Cavalry attempted to disarm the Indians, Yellowbird was dancing, chanting and throwing handfuls of dirt into the air, producing a state of high agitation. I considered what yellow colored birds would be native to the area and picked the Common Yellowthroat with its black bandit mask.
 
My readings of this history compelled me to take another measured risk. I thought about the women and children that got swept up in this drama. I asked my Eighteen year old former student Sigrid Walter to paint a turtle on one of the skulls. I liked it so much, I asked her to also paint one of the Magpies. Then I started thinking about including a very young person. On a Sunday afternoon, nine year old Malina Amjadi painted a lovely turtle on one of the skulls. Sigrid and Malina’s designs can be identified by their signatures on the back of their skulls.
 
There is one other notable motif that I knew I must utilize. In John G. Neihard’s landmark book, Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk recounts a first person experience of performing the Ghost Dance during the period it first arrived at Pine Ridge. In this account he referred to the sensation that his “legs seemed to be full of ants.”
 
 
Intent
 
I do not have to stretch to imagine the wild horses of 1890’s Northern Nevada observing the Ghost Dance in the same way that today’s wild horses observe the distant fires of the Burning Man Festival now. This connectivity linking the natural history of the Wild Horses, the Paleolithic caves of Southern France and Ghost Dance reinforce my emerging notion of Kinesthetic Memory. I can only describe this as an atmospheric anthropological and ecological memory that lies at the threshold of consciousness. This notion has become my artistic point of departure. If I can synthesize these elements, I will have animated and infused this project with elements of loss, regeneration, evolution and adaptation.
 
 
Scott Robert Hudson
Cedar Falls, Iowa
2013