William L. Fox is a longtime explorer of cognition and landscape -- the notion of what makes a space into a place. In this book he turns his gaze on Los Angeles, a city dominated by the movie industry, which specializes in bringing places from far away in time into what we experience as here and now -- making time, in essence. Time, Fox tells us, is the most invisible nature of all, "its effects are always and everywhere around us."
The five essays of this collection take us to the Le Brea Tar Pits and local oilfields, the telescopes and telecommunication towers of Mt. Wilson, massive landfills, the Forest Lawn Memorial and Griffith parks, a Hollywood special effects firm, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. All of these facilities are devoted to manipulating time on our behalf, be it how we represent prehistory, attempt to maintain an identity after death, or make movies on Mars.
A master of combining science, history, and his own experiences into a riveting read, Fox will make you look at L.A. -- and any urban landscape -- in an entirely new way.

The most comprehensive account available of Michael Heizer's art by a writer and curator who has critical experience with the artist and his work. Michael Heizer is among the greatest, and often least accessible, American artists. As one of the last living figures who launched the Land Art movement, his legacy of works that are literally and metaphorically monumental has an incalculable influence on the world of sculpture and environmental art. But his seclusion in the remote Nevada desert, as well as his notorious obduracy, have resulted in significant gaps in our critical understanding. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments spans the breadth of Heizer's career, uniquely combining fieldwork, personal narrative, and biographical research to create the first major assessment in years of this titan of American art. Author William L. Fox, founding director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, has alternately been a sponsor, advocate, and critic of Heizer's work for decades. Fox's understanding of the artist's history and connection to landscape, his time spent with Heizer at the remote ranch where Heizer is finishing his magnum opus - the mile-long sculpture City - and his access to some of Heizer's key associates give him a unique position from which to discuss the artist's work. Fox has also made numerous site visits to Heizer's work - including early pieces in the Nevada desert now largely lost to the elements - to correct the often inconsistent accounts of their locations. Last, Fox imparts a crucial new understanding of Heizer's work by elaborating on the artist's bond with his father, the famed archaeologist and cultural ecologist Robert Heizer, who enlisted his son on important digs in Mexico and Peru, providing the young man with an appreciation of site, landscape, and geology that would thoroughly inform his work. Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments is a long overdue addition to the critical and biographical literature of this major figure in American art.

Late Harvest juxtaposes contemporary art made with taxidermy with historically significant wildlife paintin gs, resulting in intriguing parallels and startling aesthetic aesthetic contrasts. The publication seeks to simultaneously confirm — through historically - significant wildlife paintings — and subvert — through contemporary art and photography — viewers’ preconcepti ons of the place of animals in culture. The richly illustrated catalogue will feature artists as: Richard Ansdell, David Brooks, George Browne, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Petah Coyne, Raymond Ching, Kate Clark, Wim Delvoye, Mark Dion, Elmgreen & Dragset, Carle e Fernandez, Richard Friese, François Furet, Nicholas Galanin, George Bouverie Goddard, Damien Hirst, William Hollywood, Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker), Alfred Kowalski, Robert Kuhn , Wilhelm Kuhnert, Bruno Liljefors, Polly Morgan, John Newsom, T im Noble and Sue Webster, Walter Robinson, George Rotig, Carl Rungius, Yinka Shonibare MBE, David Shrigley, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Amy Stein, Archibald Thorburn, Mary Tsiongas, Joseph Wolf, Brigitte Zieger, Andrew Zuckerman The exhibition Late Harvest is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art in consultation with the National Museum of Wildlife Art. It is curated by JoAnne Northrup, Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives, together with consulting curator Adam Duncan Harris, Ph.D., Petersen Curator of Art & Research, National Museum of Wildlife Art.

In a new approach to environmental photography, Dana Fritz explores the world's largest enclosed landscapes: Arizona's Biosphere 2, Cornwall's Eden Project, and Nebraska's Lied Jungle and Desert Dome at the Henry Doorly Zoo. In these vivaria, plants are grown amid carefully constructed representations of the natural world to entertain and educate tourists while also supporting scientific research. Together, these architectural and engineering marvels stand as working symbols of our complex relationship with the environment. Giant terraria require human control of temperature, humidity, irrigation, insects, weeds, and other conditions to create otherwise impossible ecosystems. While technical demands inform the design of these spaces, the juxtapositions of natural and artificial elements generate striking visual paradoxes that can go unnoticed. Here Fritz turns away from visitors' prepared sight lines, revealing alternate views that dispel the illusion of natural conditions. Inviting questions about what it means to create and contain landscapes, Terraria Gigantica inspires contemplation of our ecological future.

Includes bonus interactive DVD. In the 19th century the great expeditionary photographers William Henry Jackson, T H O'Sullivan, and William Bell first photographed American western landscapes for the geological and geographical surveys. Mark Klett, Chief photographer of the Rephotographic Survey Project, revisited and rephotographed these 19th-century sites during the late 1970s, presenting 120 pairs of photographs separated by a century of change. Two decades later, Klett organised a new survey team to rephotograph 110 sites. This book presents forty-three pairings from the third survey, documenting two periods of geologic and environmental changes while exploring changing human perceptions of landscape. Published in association with the Center for American Places