It Exists in Many Forms - 2019.
Miles C. Bates House (Wave House),
Restoration Site - Palm Desert, CA.
7 Channel Generative Sound
DeWALT Worksite Boom Boxes
Installation Views, DesertX
Photos by Lance Gerber

Using the innovative wave roofline of the iconic Miles C. Bates House as an acoustic resonator, It Exists in Many Forms is a land art work that interrogates the meaning of stewardship. In the context of mid-century modern enthusiasm, and the restoration of homes like the Wave House, a symphonic earconography of site-specific anxieties obscures a system of irrational discourses disciplined and tuned for market speculation. In the desert, restoration of an iconic mid-century modern home represents the nostalgic persistence of atomic age idealisms from which the contemporary veneration of mid-century modernism has emerged. The window as portal for natural light and exterior views vis-à-vis landscape painting creates a state of tacit awe for dwellers and collectors of mid-century modern homes. The positioning of homes as artistic fetish emerges out of historic tract home production for articulating an economy of scale for massive, previously unimaginable, suburban development within desert climates with limited resources to support human life. At this site of human complexity and “the simplicity of clean lines,” It Exists in Many Forms is a meditation on the worldview, noise harmonies, and methodology of stewardship that has prized the anesthetization of land for maximum yield per square plot development.