The desert is vast, but fragile and vulnerable; beautiful, rapidly and constantly changing; neat, clean, open, ordered, disciplined and precise. And it's honest, revealing everything, clarifying every relationship. I try to bring this back, not as a souvenir, but as icon and metaphor. I'm interested in the tension between abstraction and representation, in the mark and in what it represents; in surface as fragile membrane; in the precision of chance and the controlled chaos of gesture, and, underneath the work, in earth as anxious object because of us.

-Mel Pekarsky