Sculpture · 2026
1848
A material meditation on rupture, possession, and memory in the Mojave Desert.
- Materials
- Stone, gun-blued whiskey hoop, blue steel pipe
- Dimensions
- 145.28 × 38.41 cm
- Inventory
- YBS-SC-2026-001
- Status
- Available by inquiry
Wall label
1848
1848 reflects on the year California became U.S. territory and the Mojave Desert entered a new era of settlement, extraction, and imposed ownership. A stone base honors the older Indigenous and geological memory of the desert, while the gun-blued whiskey hoop and blue steel pipe reference frontier mythology, violence, trade, water, and industrial occupation.
Sculpture treatment
Concept statement
1848 is built from three primary elements. Each carries a different historical pressure.
The stone base represents the older desert: geology, Indigenous presence, mineral time, and the Mojave as a living place before it was divided by treaties, borders, parcels, roads, and ownership documents. It is not decorative. It is the ground.
Rising from the stone is a blue steel pipe, an industrial support that feels both structural and invasive. It suggests wells, extraction, water control, fencing, mining, and the later infrastructure that allowed settlers, ranchers, soldiers, and developers to occupy the desert.
The focal point is a gun-blued whiskey hoop. The circle becomes a barrel, a boundary, a trade object, a target, a halo, and a wound. Its finish links it to firearms, violence, preservation, and masculine frontier mythology.
The title refers to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the year California passed from Mexican control into the hands of the United States. The sculpture is not simply about a date. It is about the moment land became paperwork, when ancient territory was absorbed into a new political system.
The piece holds beauty and violence at the same time. The blued metal is seductive. The stone is quiet. The pipe is blunt. Together they create a desert relic from an alternate history: part monument, part artifact, part warning.