CALEB ENGSTROM
Forty Balls, Sixteen Miles, or Four Hours, performance with video and photo documentation, 2007

Growing up as a boy in rural Iowa, multi-talented Caleb Engstrom, spent considerable time working part time jobs, wrestling on school teams, and piling in his family's large conversion van to drive over an hour to go to church every Sunday and Wednesday night.  In the fall of 2005 Engstrom decided to drop out of college and pursue music full-time. After traveling for over two months in his 1986 Delta 88, playing over 40 shows, he decided it was time to come home and figure some things out. He has re-enrolled for college, in Iowa City, at the University of Iowa. His moving is a bit softer in the audio realm and a bit harder in the visual realm these days, although he did manage to travel up to Martha's Vineyard in January of 2007 to record his second full length, A Mountain or a Bird, and, with producer Joey Lemon; not to mention grabbing opening slots for Jose Gonzalez, Phil Evelrum (microphones), Horse Feathers, and Dave Bazan. It is safe to say that Caleb has always felt a bit troubled with the state of having his feet placed in more then one spot, but with the expectancy of graduation in Spring 2008, those spots,both audio and visual, will be a bit easier to stand on.

Of this work, Engstrom writes, "I constructed forty clay balls made from a plaster mold that I made from a large (16" in diameter) bouncy ball. I then covered them in
black wax. They were all then loaded up into the back of a pickup truck and taken
to the performance site (near a friend's friends farm). The construction process took about two months. This performance took place out on a friend of mines farm in Northeast Iowa. I walked approximately twenty miles, one fourth to half of a mile with each ball that I made. The duration of the piece was 4 hours."