JEANINE OLESON AND ELLEN LESPERANCE
Off the Grid (Florida VII), C-print, 30" x40 ", 2003

About the artwork, Oleson and Lesperance write: the Off the Grid project of performance-based large format photographs was initiated in 2001. As collaborators, we want to explore the gestures and performances of survival by setting up open-ended situations in the natural landscape where we perform as the only human presences in the actual frame and perhaps the world. We evoke images of pure escapism from contemporary life into pre-modern fantasy. During the performances, there is a tension between an intuitive, earnest intent and a self-conscious humor that comes from indulging in the fantasy of living outside of society while being absolutely rooted within it.

Guided by cultural politics, feminism, film theory, popular culture, revisionist history and ethnography, the content of the work also celebrates things commonly associated with the derogatory, including queerness and low brow culture, while always employing the oppositional aesthetic ideas of form and structure. By fusing New Age spirituality with the Hudson River School, out-of-date natural history displays with Feminist history, earnest vision quests with barely-off-the-interstate wilderness—a perverse hybrid emerges.