Lay of my Land

Lay of my Land is a sculpture of the 35 acres that composed AZ West at the time of it’s founding. The history of western expansion is in large part a history of land and real estate. First divided up by the Jeffersonian grid (a one mile square system meant to facilitate land distribution from Washington DC), the land in the High Desert was then further divided by the “baby” Homestead Act which promised 5 acre parcels free to those who would construct a small structure on their parcel. Lay of my Land speaks to this history of division and subdivision by representing the seemingly endless desert as gridded chunks of segregated and conceptually isolated commodities.