sage, Mono Lake (gm.archive)

Sean McFarland

2025

Medium: great basin desert dust, sagebrush trichomes, sharpie, tape, paper

Dimensions: 14.5” x 10”

Price: Upon request

Description: In the summer of 2023, I was making postcards with my niece, who lives in the town of Lee Vining, near the shore of Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra, where I’ve been making work for the last several years. I had taped a piece of sagebrush to a postcard and showed it to my niece to see what she thought. She said I should remove it, so I did. Upon doing so, desert dust and trichomes from the sage adhered to the tape, while the leaf fell to the table, leaving its image behind. I grabbed a piece of faded black construction paper and stuck the tape on it - it was like a ghost - an image of the leaf, the leaf itself, and the absence of the leaf all at once. It was what I wanted to see and reminded me of the gift of paying attention. The work in the show was made in the summer of 2025 in the same place and in much the same way. It is from Glass Mountains, an ongoing archive/body of work that began in 2012. Individual works in the archive date from 1998 to the present, and into the future. Glass Mountains is an investigation of the interplay, deep complexity, and beauty of the earth, creating a place for us to think about how all is interconnected. The resulting works are at once a meditation on place, phenomena, what it means to be present, and how we remember.