Southwest Contemporary: OBSESSION foregrounds artistic fixations, revealing the loops, patterns, and intensities that define the Southwest’s cultural landscape.
Welcome to Volume 12 of Southwest Contemporary: OBSESSION.
I believe it’s safe to say that we’re all obsessed. I mean, isn’t all art and creative production driven by some state of obsession?
Behold our obsessions made incarnate, perfect bound and in full color, in Volume 12 of Southwest Contemporary: OBSESSION.
In these pages you’ll find us obsessing over high and low, canon and kitsch, material and message. True to its theme, the issue holds an unusual number of recurring references to ideas, artists, and artworks throughout, like linchpins of influence, or a song that’s stuck in your head.
Come explore the curious obsessions of the artists in this issue. They descend into caves, inhabit different identities, accumulate, catalogue, dissect, and repeat. Their practices respond—in minute detail and with sweeping perspective—to the conditions and currents of the Southwest, a region that has been shaped by internal and faraway fixations for centuries.
In our features, Caitlin Lorraine Johnson visits the studios of three New Mexico–based artists who are married to their media, finding endless inspiration in the exploration of a single material. Karla Lagunas reflects on the obsessive drive behind Michael Heizer’s fifty-year project City (1970-2022) in the Nevada desert. Jordan Eddy busts the myth behind Agnes Martin’s reputation as a meticulous genius toiling away in solitude, revealing her vibrant social life in Galisteo and Taos, New Mexico. And Scotti Hill examines the materially obsessive processes of three artists who reflect on the mythos of Utah, a state defined by the dominance of Mormonism.
As we put the final touches on this issue, I consider, too, what an obsessive practice it is to make a magazine—the endless rounds of edits, the fact checking, the fine-tuning involved from headlines down to image captions. I hope you love this issue—and its particularly opulent imagery—as much as we do.
Thank you for joining us at Southwest Contemporary. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter and become a member for more critical perspectives on art and culture throughout the Southwest.
—Natalie Hegert, arts editor
