I began to envision texts in the earth
much like the archaeological fragments
that I had been photographing.
Judy Natal

With this vision photographer Judy Natal began her extensive series EarthWords, photographs in which she juxtaposes the urban language of signs with the quiet expanse of Joshua Tree National Park. Natal mined the cities and the urban sprawl for retired signage in the form of large plastic, metal, or neon letters and then searched the landscape for fragments that could hold an aesthetic dialogue with the text of the letters. The resulting work allows both those familiar with Joshua Tree and those who have never experienced its uniqueness to traverse it as though it were a poemÑthrough the focused perspective and rhythm of an artist determined to reveal its lyricism.

Inspired by the writings of Earthworks sculptor Robert Smithson, Natal applied to the artist-in-residence program at Joshua Tree National Park in California and set out to investigate the language of the landscape. Natal was impressed by the magnificent vistas and lured by the 19th century notion of a grand landscape. However, her views of Joshua Tree are not the omniscient and objective views and sweeping vistas of traditional landscape photography but rather the opposite. They are overtly manipulated interpretations of fragmented views of that landscape. Natal focuses on specific segments of the land forcing the viewer to interact with the landscape as they would with a text: to focus on each word, phrase, and paragraph at a time. Once the entire text is read or the landscape viewed then it takes on an overall rhythm. Her ultimate intent is to "invert the traditional text/image relationship by reading the photograph and viewing the text." EarthWords, which was photographed over the last four years in Joshua Tree, affords the viewer a much more comprehensive view of the parkÕs diversity, patterning, and as Natal puts it, "language."

In Joshua Tree Natal discovered sites where the land had been manipulated by text from petroglyphs, to the philosophical rantings of 19th century Swedish homesteader James Samuelson, to contemporary spray-paint graffiti. NatalÕs interventions at these sites create some of her most intriguing images where different forms of language are layered. The petroglyphs, which are simultaneously image and text, are an historical precedent that Natal plays off of as she arranges letters from the text-based alphabet until they become images instead of text. These images emphasize the historical impulse to express oneself through marking in relation to nature. As Natal carries the signage of urban sprawl out into a national park she renders ambiguous the lines between culture and nature, art and language, and photographs and prose. These images make it emphatically clear that language, land, text and image are fundamentally related.

Natal's EarthWords images connect and contrast issues of land preservation and the cultural language of the sign. This is a body of work that both celebrates the unique resources of our local environment and opens up a dialogue on the visual nature of language and symbol.

Symposium & Poetry Reading: Traversing the Language of the Land, June 8, 3-5 pm Opening Reception: June 8, 7-9 pm Partial support for this exhibition has been generously provided by Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois; The Polaroid Corporation; Park Stewardship Through the Arts, (PASTA); and The Community Arts Assistance Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

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