It Calls from the Creek is site-specific installation created by Unmanned Minerals (Gabie Strong, Matthew Hebert, Jared Stanley). It was located along the Deer Creek Tribute Trail which asks the walking viewer to consider forces shaping Deer Creek, the Yuba River watershed, and the Pacific world. The installation features a series of poems written by contemporary poets living along the watershed and its drainage systems. The poems reflect on this network of water and its influence on their everyday lives. The poems are sited in the land using a wayfinding system made of signs, site-markers, and solar-powered electrical audio recordings. The wayfinding system guides the visitor along the Tribute Trail in the form of a walking-poem, connecting her to the greater watershed through poetry and landscape to reinforce a crucial relationship with water.
Deer Creek Tribute Trail follows along many points of historical and natural interest. The artists gravitated towards sites that seemed reflexive of both local circumstances and global forces. The artists were inspired to create this work by the history of Deer Creek, the literary history of Nevada City and its environs, and the geography of the region. They selected numerous points along the trail that represent the importance of human history in this “natural” environment. Gary Snyder writes, “The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home.” It Calls from the Creek invites the visitor—animal, human and plant—to do just that.
“The challenge of public art,” Lucy Lippard writes in The Lure of the Local, “lies in dealing with other people’s freedom.” And for Unmanned Minerals, public art is a democratic practice, all the more important in a period when democracy is under threat.
The work was installed along the Dear Creek Tribute Trail in Nevada City from September 2013 - September 2014.
Trailhead map directing the hiker through a landscape mediated by language.
Jared drilling into the soil to pour foundation concrete for paver
Matthew Hebert's fabrication of the signs, audio playback devices, and paver stones.
Jared worked with friends to record his narration of each poem describing the Deer Creek water as it flows from the Sierras to the Pacific.
Gabie's early concept sketches for the project.
Graphic representation of our interests are represented in the UM logo. The logo was used to "brand" signage, audio playback devices, and site markers along the trail.
Detail image of completed paver. Milled ABS plastic and colored concrete.
Concrete site marker. These markers referenced Department of Interior site markers, and also summoned darker powers.
