This photocopy publication acts as documentation of Zak’s road-trip through Heilman country.
The title refers to a work by Nancy Holt, located in the Great Basin desert outside the deserted town of Lucin, Utah. Parallels here can be drawn between Zak’s decision to drive through Heiman, an unincorporated community in Pigeon Township, Warrick County in Indiana. Zak appears to be embarking on a journey of exploration of female artists and art writing by embodying and collating interpreted elements of selected practices. Holt’s work consists of four concrete tunnels (18 feet long and nine feet in diameter), which are arranged in an “X” configuration. Each tunnel reacts to the sun differently, aligned with the sunrise, sunset, of the summer or winter solstice.
The monochromatic photographs depict Zak’s own sun tunnel work, displaying ones found along the route of her trip. The tunnels are used to frame the landscape, a subject (dog or female figure), other sun tunnels, and the trajectory of the sun’s rays. The cavities within them and the perspectives they create and emphasize speak of a journeying - a horizon in the distance which the viewer can aim to reach. This could be interpreted as an allegory for the passage of female artists, through both collective and individual practice and throughout art history, the feminist movement constantly attempting to make ground on horizons which are proposed to be out of their reach, due to their gender.
There is an interesting relationship here between the man-made concreteness of the tunnels and their haphazard existence in desolate space, accessible yet also difficult to reach. Their solid existence is in dialogue with the serendipity of their discovery and resolute presentation as sculpture - large scale, readymade installations which are reminiscent of both Richard Long and Serra. Again, an interesting provocation that artists who come to mind as references are predominantly male.
Throughout the zine the bottom right hand corner is occupied by small images of paintings, no information given. In the back pages they are revealed to be part of Judy Chicago’s book ‘Through the Flower: my struggle as a woman artist’. One of the paintings is titled ‘Car Hood’ (1964) and is sprayed acrylic lacquer on a Chevrolet hood. Nestled in with the eighth chapter (‘Learning from the past’) of Chicago’s book, the passage which speaks of women artist writing, there seems to be a comment on the masculinity of these artworks - bold patterns painted on cars, an evocative pairing with the feminist thematics embedded in the unfolding expedition in Zak’s photographic narrative.
Other text includes a monologue saturated with slang, assumedly written by Zak herself from a Starbucks, mediating on subjects such as the freedom of driving, the right of shade and the great American story.
