Jim Frazer
Salt Lake City, UT
https://jimfrazer.com
IG: @frazer.jim

San Juan
2024
Digital prints, board, tyvek, acrylic paint, magnets
Two volumes, each 16 x 10 x 1.25 inches closed; Accordion unfolds up to 24 x 80 inches max; Maps volume 16 x 20 inches open

San Juan is the name of a river in the extreme southeastern corner of Utah. My book uses the river, as experienced both by floating down it over a period of days and by researching the history of the area, as an entry point for meditations about uncertainty and how we know what we know (or think we know) about a place. The meandering course of the river is the unifying element in both the visual and verbal parts of the book. The San Juan has such a distinctive meandering course through its canyon that it is used as a textbook example of this phenomenon. Geologists have found that contrary to intuition, this seemingly inefficient course is the one that best balances all of the various competing forces in a flow. The river resists keeping to a direct course, and I suggest that we can learn from the river’s wisdom accumulated over millennia and embrace a process of meandering between envisioning possibilities and justifying belief. This approach of alternating between imagining what may seem improbable, or is even thought impossible, and discerning how these dreams may perhaps be realized is really the approach of both research scientists and artists. It was, unintentionally, the process of the early Spanish colonizers and European settlers as fantasy fed through their greed and fears to shape their perception of place. In the end, the process of searching after what proved to be not there revealed the actual landscape. 

The book is in two sections. Each section is comprised of an intertwined combination of words and collaged images. The first section consists of four accordion folios, each with two or three double sided panels. The background for the recto of each panel is a contemporary topographic map of the portion of the river where the trip took place. These can be laid out in a connecting fashion to form a continuous map of the river. The versos of the panels contain additional collage elements and pockets containing text in smaller folios. Some of the images are removable to reveal additional images behind. In some instances, I have combined several of my photographs with each other in the AI program Midjourney to form new images. Sometimes the effect is subtle, other times more fantastical. Counterpoising what was really there with what has been imagined is a reference to the historical stories and accounts about the area that built various fantasies on grains of truth.  

The second section is a book of maps bound with a checkerboard binding to contain copies of historical maps of the area that speak to the tension between the desire of cartographers to provide accurate information and the desires of the European explorers to promote their fantasies of unknown lands and untold riches that were always just out of reach. Cartographers from as far away as Venice drew maps of the desert where they had never been, and filled the empty spaces with mountains of pure silver and the supposed location of bearded Indians, whose existence was debated by intellectuals such as Voltaire and the naturalist Buffon. The more accurate the maps became, the less information they contained until in 1878, John Wesley Powell simply left the area of the San Juan blank for lack of verified knowledge. San Juan is based on a trip, but it is not a travelogue. It examines the process of exploration, not just the act of a journey in unfamiliar territory, but the process of looking for explanation. It is possible to define a circle by drawing all lines tangent to it. All those lines, however, form a network of intersections outside the shape, objects all on their own. By starting out to define one thing which seems central, a whole system of convergences is revealed. Following a thought path meandering like the San Juan is letting the tangents have their space and allowing those connections, however unlikely, to come forward and present themselves.