“The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates’ space...It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given...the value of distance.” —C.S. Lewis from Surprised By Joy
From the Director: “While growing up in the 80’s on the suburban fringe of Denver, Colorado, I could look west from my rooftop to see the city and its million residents spread beneath the Rocky Mountains. Turning opposite and looking east revealed nothing but an ocean of prairie grass rolling out six hundred miles past the horizon, whose shores lay at our back gate. Our suburb, Aurora, was named for its unencumbered view of the rising sun. Within a year we were no longer on the periphery as a force known to us only as growth had leapt our neighborhood, depositing 500 houses, 4 strip-malls, 3 churches and the new high school, Rangeview in its wake. By the time I graduated from that high school, a view of the open range meant first driving fifteen minutes, I’m not sure where to see a sunrise in Aurora any longer.
As a film student I often returned there to shoot now-impossible views of the fledgling suburb colliding with the native landscape. My thoughts return to Aurora even more often. Beyond nostalgia and the struggle to embrace change, I think there was something bigger and more significant happening there and on the fringes of all of the explosively growing western suburbs. When discussing one such area, Las Vegas, the architect and theorist Robert Venturi described the city, not as a construct, but rather as the pattern left in the landscape when we live our lives. So what does that pattern tell us?”
A Survey of Open Space is Duggins' attempt to answer that question using the rapidly-shrinking West as a litmus-strip. The documentary, currently in production, follows an unlikely trio of cyclists, as they pedal their way across the broadest and sparsest swath of the US, beginning on the Mexican border at Brownsville, Texas and concluding on the shores of the Arctic Ocean in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The project is an examination of the American frontier, one mile at a time.
FOR FUSEBOX, illustrations, observations and musings from the road will be uploaded each day as part of the festival--a real time travel log documenting the cross-country trek.
In addition to filming, director Peat Duggins will be keeping a production sketchbook on the road, posting notes and sketches online, daily for Fusebox’09. Using multiple media to explore an idea is one that is very familiar to Duggins who has spent much of his career cycling between various art forms. After graduating with a degree in Film from the Rhode Island School of Design, he relocated to Austin to pursue a career in sculpture and drawing, simultaneously working professionally in animation illustration, and design. He co-founded and continues to co-direct the acclaimed Okay Mountain gallery, and has been awarded numerous awards for his artwork, including fellowships from the Bemis Center for Contemporary and the Yaddo Artist colony. In 2004-05 he worked as an animator on Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. He was recently awarded the Dozier Travel Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art to cover travel costs for this project.
SPONSORS/DONORS:
Mike Chesser
Refraction Arts
Shower Pass
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