Geyser Land

Mary Ellen Strom creates video installations, performances, and site-specific projects. Ann Carlson is a choreographer, director, and performance artist who combines movement, voice, and visual elements. The artists' recent collaborative project, Geyserland (August 2003), was first performed on a train from Livingston to Bozeman, Montana. For their Troy audience, Strom and Carlson will partially reenact the experience of being on the train. The evening will be narrated by Carlson and will include live performance elements and video projections.

Geyser Land was a site specific installation conceived by video artist Mary Ellen Strom and performance artist/choreographer Ann Carlson. The Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents produced this work in August 2003.

Geyser Land took place along the railroad tracks between Livingston and Bozeman, Montana. The audience experienced this hour-long work while being transported in a railroad passenger car. Out of the train's windows the audience witnessed video projections on rock faces of mountains, commercial buildings and industrial sites. Live performers re-created archival photos in the tradition of tableau vivant outside, amidst and embedded into the projections.

Geyser Land sought to be a conceptual tourist attraction; it was an actual train ride, a work of living sculpture, a multi-dimensional art work that investigated the multiple ways a western mythology was constructed over one hundred years ago that laid the groundwork for the region's colonization and development.

The audience boarded a beautiful train, complete with dome cars and refreshments for an hour long experience. On the train the audience sat in the middle of it all: video projections, live performances, tableaus of archival photos and voices of both contemporary and historical peoples will enveloped the rider. The train located the spectator in a tourist position, inviting them to consider how the railroad was a tool of colonialism, and exposed how nineteenth and twentieth century representational systems such as photography, film and advertising produced and promoted the West's mythologies. The Geyser Land experience was located near the entrance to Yellowstone Park; a place trafficked by millions of contemporary tourists each summer.

Geyser Land was a celebration of place as well as a pointed look at history, time and landscape. The contemporary spectator was challenged to make comparisons between the cultural ideology, economic reality and landscapes of past and present.