Wendover: Why on Earth

Wendover sits on the boundary between two worlds: casinos and the desert, Mountain time and Pacific time, puerile Utah and party-all-night Nevada.

Wendover, Why on Earth is land art without taking up the physical space. The experimental feature follows an artist, an urban planner, and a student filmmaker as they create a visual love-hate letter to the Wendover area. This letter includes the vibrant desert in Autumn, the industrializing Salt Flats, the old Wendover Airbase that was repurposed into artist studios, galleries, artefact displays using haphazard storage and preservation methods; and the crumbling remains of USA's World War Two-era atomic offence infrastructure sitting in late-Capitalist western USA.

Art-focused CLUI Wendover recasts the deserts and casinos as spaces of artistic experimentation, but also exposes the inherent human occupation, impact, and contamination as part of humans trying to dominate the fragile landscape.

When compared to the colourful, bright casinos, the old Wendover Airbase's desperate attempt to preserve the crumbling spaces in which the nuclear bombs were loaded onto aircraft before being let loose on the Japanese people, exposes our desire to be distracted from uncomfortable pasts by the dazzling, but fleeting present.

The entire work, primarily filmed in 2014, is narrated by the artist. He looks back on the trip seven years later and wonders, given travel's enormous effect on the global climate, the COVID19 Pandemic's exposure of much of the travel industry as an overpriced and complex distraction, and the Wendover area's extreme human and ecological inequities, whether the visit was exploratory and pleasurable, or voyeuristic and simply reinforced privileged perspectives.