Desert Perspectives

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) presents Desert Perspectives, a year-long exhibition that uses the museum's collection as a living archive to examine how artistic representations of the greater Southwestern deserts evolve understandings of landscape, ecology, identity, and place. Bringing together works from the collection alongside contemporary commissions and loans, the exhibition traces more than a century of artistic engagement with these spaces, while proposing an alternative model for collection-based exhibition-making rooted in recontextualization, dialogue, and sustained inquiry. 

At the heart of the project is a broader question: how might a regional collection be activated as a site for analyzing evolving cultural relationships to place? Looking at deserts through the lenses of phenomenology and humanistic geography, akin to the theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edward S. Casey, and Yi-Fu Tuan, the experience of place moves beyond the subjective toward the lived, embodied experience as the basis through which the world is constituted and understood (particularly in relation to landscape and place). In humanistic geography, anthropology, and environmental humanities, this has been expanded to ask how place is experienced through the body, memory, movement, affect, and everyday being. 

Rather than presenting the collection through a fixed historical narrative, Desert Perspectives approaches it as an active foundation, through which shifting questions of representation, environment, and belonging can be explored. Structured through three sequential rotations, the exhibition continually repositions historical frameworks within new thematic and temporal contexts, revealing how meaning is produced. 

The exhibition begins from the premise that the idea of "the desert" is not a neutral or immutable geographic reality but a cultural construct continually shaped through competing histories, perceptions, and forms of inhabitation. Throughout Western art history, representations of desert landscapes have been alternately framed as sublime wilderness, frontier territory, ecological resource, spiritual landscape, or sites of extraction and development, playing a significant role in shaping collective imaginaries of these environments. Such representations have not merely documented these spaces; they have actively shaped how they are understood, valued, occupied, and transformed. 

By placing historical frameworks in conversation with contemporary artistic practices, Desert Perspectives examines the ways visual culture contributes to the ongoing production of knowledge about land and environment. The exhibition traces a movement from landscape as representation to landscape as environmental condition to landscape as lived experience, revealing how artistic approaches to the desert have evolved alongside changing understandings of place, ecology, and identity. 

Serving as conceptual anchors throughout the exhibition are newly commissioned and site-responsive installations by Joshua Haunschild, Jen Urso, Susanna Battin, Jacob Meders, Rebecca Padilla, and Julie Anand and Damon Sauer. These projects investigate subjects including ecological precarity, the cultivation of reciprocal relationships, and the cultural significance of iconic sites, such as the Grand Canyon. Remaining on view throughout the year, these installations are recontextualized with each rotation, drawing out various perspectives of and from the desert.  

Approaching the desert through a phenomenological understanding of place—as lived, relational, and constituted through embodied experience, memory, and ongoing interactions between human and nonhuman systems—the exhibition moves beyond the modality of representational landscape. In doing so, it foregrounds the desert as a site of reciprocal meaning-making, ecological interdependence, and continual negotiation. Through this evolving structure, Desert Perspectives positions the museum’s collection as a dynamic field through which new relationships and understanding of place can emerge.

Desert Perspectives is organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Keshia Turley, assistant curator. Support provided by Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation.