RICHARD LONG

Van de Weghe Fine Art is pleased to announce our summer exhibition: Richard Long’s Little Tejunga Canyon Line. Like all of Long’s works, Little Tejunga Canyon Line is related to landscape, or, more precisely, to the artist’s experience of walking through a particular landscape. For Long, however, walking is not so much a performative act as a productive one, a way to “explore relationships between time, distance, geography, and measurement”. From the walk comes an object that seeks to represent – in both form and connotation – that particular experience, and equally incorporates both place and time into its folds.

Little Tejunga Canyon Line represents a walk taken by the artist in Little Tejunga Canyon, located in the San Gabriel Mountains, at the southwestern edge of the Angeles National Forest, in southern California. The canyon runs north-south through the mountains, which rise up out of the Los Angeles basin, snaking eighteen miles between the Hansen Dam and Bouquet Canyon. Little Tejunga Canyon Line is, like the geographical place that inspires it, long (nearly thirty-five feet), and relatively narrow (four feet across). The geological composition of the Tejunga terrain – marble, calc-silicate rocks, quartzite, and aluminous and graphitic schists – is mirrored in the granite stones Long has chosen to arrange in this form.

While this literal relation between place, walk, and object does exist, Little Tejunga Canyon Line is, in the end, greater than the sum of these component parts, conveying the majesty and elegance of Little Tejunga Canyon itself.