Chip Lord grew up in 1950’s America, a place that has been a continual source of inspiration in his work as an artist. Trained as an architect, he was a founding partner of Ant Farm, with whom he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the public sculpture, Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo Texas, and the House of the Century, outside Houston, Texas.
His work blends documentary and experimental practice and moves between video, photography and installation. He often collaborates with other artists. Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule], a collaboration with Curtis Schreier and Bruce Tomb, revisits Ant Farm’s 1970 Media Van and brings it into the 21st Century. The installation posits a “post-internal combustion vehicle’ as a space for networking around a “Media Huqquh” and in the process creates a digital time capsule. An abiding interest in the culture of transportation systems inspired The Executive Air Traveler, 1980, a photo series; Airspaces, 2000 – 2011 and To & From LAX, a public video installation in 2010. Lord authored Automerica for E.P. Dutton and the car as subject also “drives” MOTORIST, Road Movie, and The New Cars, 2012.
Chip Lord’s work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the FRAC Centre, the Pompidou Centre, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film & Digital Media, U.C. Santa Cruz, and lives in San Francisco.
Lord is represented by the Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
Hayden Pedigo
Living in the Texas Panhandle my whole life, being the son of a baptist preacher & living in the middle of nowhere I spent most of my time listening to records and playing guitar. I was 14 when I heard John Fahey and it changed my life from then on. I love the sounds of krautrock and the american primitive guitar of Fahey and Basho.
“Greetings from Amarillo is an album I started writing in 2015 trying to create a group of songs about my hometown of Amarillo Texas. Amarillo is one of the strangest cities on the face of the earth and one of the flattest places you will probably ever find. I remember hearing Terry Allen’s song “Amarillo Highway” as a teenager and laughing at how well it described this place. These songs cover every aspect of home from the crazy wind, to the amazing sunsets and sprawling landscapes. These pieces are my most realized attempts at trying to blend my solo acoustic guitar works and the synthesizer based ambience into blended pieces each with a unique environment. Greetings from Amarillo is a musical postcard but also an invitation to look around and spend some time in the audio rendering of the Texas Panhandle.”
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