The hope of pristine and picturesque wilderness, adventure, fresh air, and memories forged with friends and family is the siren song of the outdoor tourism industry. Utah, in particular, is a destination for many seeking this type of experience. It is home to five national parks that comprise over 1,300 square miles of geological and historical wonder: Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion National Park. High chroma photographs that accentuate the fiery red-rock formations against ethereal blue skies are the bait to entice would-be adventurers to traverse the desert landscape and stand in silent and meditative awe of Mother Nature.

When visiting a national park, there are a number of factors that unexpectedly frame the experience. Travelers have to negotiate vacation time, reserve campsites, buy equipment, plan their road-trip playlists, pack their vehicles, drive for hours on end, haggle over bathroom stops, find palatable roadside dining, circle parking lots, work with shuttle schedules, set up camp at often congested sites, deal with pit toilets, and hike in unfavorable weather. When the perfect picture is to be captured for posterity, a vantage that excludes all the other posing tourists, upraised camera phones, and distracting detritus can be nearly unattainable. It is akin to pilgrims traveling to Paris to view the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, only to find that the desired intimate and quiet communion with the artwork is impossible as they are jostled by the swarming and camera-happy crowd in front off the diminutive artwork sitting distantly behind barriers and bullet-proof glass.

Images of national parks found on postcards, social media, and park websites consumed prior to a vacation shape visitors’ expectations as they look forward. Then the photos and videos taken by tourists cement and mold their memories as they look back. The roads, trails, and signage direct movement and attention to the primary attractions and photo ops. The pristine wilderness exists only as a myth to the sightseer since their experience is highly guided, mediated, and manicured. Often, direct rapport with the earth is not even desired. Campers bring with them all the amenities they can in their cars, trucks, SUVs, and RVs—creating a portable, bougie, suburban home with a national park as their front lawn in search of an idyllic #vanlife.

Our national parks were initially envisioned as part preserve and part playground, and these two interests are continually colliding. Access to protected land results in the scarification of the earth with roads and trails, restrooms, and visitor centers. It is this type of interference and mediated experience that irked noted author and one-time resident of Arches, Edward Abbey, who wrote, “Arches National Monument has become a travesty called Arches National Park—a static diorama seen through glass.”¹

Artists Katie Hargrave and Meredith Lynn were fascinated by Utah’s national parks, not solely for the landscape, but for the thing that Abbey despised: the cloud of surrounding tourist culture—from the postcard promises of leisure and adventure to the nitty gritty of camping. Outfitted as proper vacationers with a rented van and a teardrop camper, the artists set out to visit all five national parks in Utah in the early spring of 2020, counter to Abbey’s insistence that it was “better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time.”²

As John Steinbeck noted in his American travelogue, plans, schedules, and intentions are for naught as trips cannot be completely controlled. Hargrave and Lynn’s trip was cut short as fears surrounding COVID-19 began spreading across the nation in March and organizations began to shut down, including national parks. Fortunately, the abbreviated itinerary allowed them to fly home the day before a 5.7-magnitude earthquake manifested just southwest of the Salt Lake City Airport, forcing it to shut down on the day of their original departure. This same earthquake damaged property in downtown Salt Lake City including the historic Rio Grande Depot that houses a gallery space where the artists were scheduled to exhibit the fruits of their collaborative trek through Utah’s national parks. Their exhibition was postponed indefinitely while repairs took place and COVID restrictions were enacted. Their original plans were dashed to “wreckage on the personality of the trip.”³

The artists were able to pivot and still exhibit their work at The New Gallery at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, November to December, 2020. References to the work in this essay are based on their exhibition at The New Gallery titled Over Look / Under Foot.

The project started in Arches National Park. In advance of their trip, they scoured the internet for Creative-Commons-licensed images previous sightseers had taken of popular vistas of Arches National Park, including other people in their shots. The artists pasted these photographs of red rocks and blue sky together and had them printed onto fabric that would be fashioned into their campsite tent. When erected at the campground in Arches, the tent became a strange form of camouflage that both hid the structure within the similar landscape and caught the attention of other campers because of its unique appearance. In the gallery, video of people photographing themselves and each other in the park were rear-projected onto the tent’s doorway.

In 1971, when Arches was designated a national park, the number of annual visitors was 202,100. In 2019 (pre-pandemic), 1,659,702 individuals came through the park.⁴ On peak days, the park can see over 3,000 vehicles pass through its gates.⁵ This dramatic increase of car and foot traffic means more roads, parking, pollution, trash, and the creation of the single developed campground in the park featuring restrooms with flush toilets. It was at this campground that the artists pitched their tent highlighting the increasing human presence in the park.

Moving on to the next nearest park, Canyonlands, Hargrave and Lynn covered the windows of their camper leaving only one small hole as an aperture, effectively turning the interior into a camera obscura to capture all seven scenic overlooks as they drove through Canyonlands National Park. The resulting photographs were exhibited as they were captured, with the landscape upside down, having been inverted by the aperture. Because the photographs were taken from the vantage of the camper, without the aid of zoom lenses, the images don’t quite resemble the typical tourist pics that seek desperately to mimic professional promotional images. Instead, the camera obscura photos contain the picturesque views as well as roadside gravel, concrete parking bumpers, and road signage. They are more honest images that do not crop out the manmade facets that frame the sightseer experience.

Photography and video are such integral parts of tourism. Pics or it didn’t happen. Whereas static photography is ideal for capturing single vantage points, video is for journeys. Using the same camera obscura setup, the duo shot a video of the sixteen-mile round trip drive along the paved roadway through Waterpocket Fold in Capitol Reef National Park as the passing scenery cascaded across the camper’s interior cabinetry. The external was brought internal, as if the camper were an eye on wheels, continually watching.

At Bryce Canyon National Park, the artists turned their lens on the visitor center. They shot video around the center and gathered found footage of old national park promotional videos and vacation films from the 1950s and ’60s. Ultimately these videos and films manifested in a work at The New Gallery. Their found footage and video of the visitor center were placed inside graphic arrows found in and pulled from driving manual diagrams to assist drivers with maneuvering a vehicle with an attached camper trailer. This video was rear-projected inside another custom tent similar to their Arches tent. The nylon shell remained dark except for the slivers of the footage shimmering through the arrow’s outlines scattered across the tent’s taut fabric, like constellations guiding travelers in the night.

The last stop was at Zion National Park, the busiest of all the Utah parks, receiving 4,488,268 travelers in 2019.⁶ This concentration of traffic has led to unique solutions at Zion, including a new seasonal shuttle service. The road in and out of the park is often highly congested and the visitor center has a line of people awaiting information, brochures, and maps. However, as the artists arrived, they noted that the visitor center was closed. This was a symptom of COVID-19 as it began shutting down the nation in mid-March. Hargrave and Lynn were able to hike around the park, but not execute their original plan. Prior to the trip, they amassed vintage postcards of Zion, hoping to compare the old imagery with new ones in the visitor center gift shop. Instead, the artists sprinkled the roads depicted in their postcards with the tiny glass beads employed in reflective paint used to stripe roadways—drawing attention to this alteration of the landscape that literally paved the way for millions of visitors.

Arriving in Zion—named in reference to a holy utopia—as the world began to crumble under a plague and earthquake, was an appropriately apocalyptic way for Hargrave and Lynn to end their trek. This land which was formed by seismic upheaval, now draws throngs to spend their leisure time hiking, camping, biking, and most importantly, photographing. On top of the strata of indigenous, colonial, and Mormon histories, is a new crust of millions of digital, geotagged images and videos. This latest geohistorical layer was the mine from which the artists drew the raw materials for their project. And it is back to this layer that their project returns, as images, videos, and texts such as this.

In the spring of 1928, the artist John Heartfield stood outside a Berlin factory, asking to examine the hands of exiting workers. When he saw a quintessentially calloused and rough hand, he took the laborer to a nearby site to photograph the hand before returning to the factory to resume his search. Heartfield was part of the agitprop division of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands)—an anti-fascist party—where he had recently accepted an assignment to promote the party’s ballot placement in the fifth slot.¹ He had a vision for using a proletariat hand reaching for the camera to seize political victory—the five extended fingers creating a visual reminder to voters of which box to check.

After sorting through hundreds of photos, Heartfield and his colleagues selected a hand featuring thick, boxy fingers with deep, weathered crags.² The dark lighting appeared as a layer of factory soot and grime, lending a further air of gritty authenticity to the image. This was the hand of the people. It was isolated on a white background and emblazoned, larger than life, on posters pasted around Berlin with the accompanying tagline: “5 Finger hat die Hand. Mit 5 packst Du den Feind.” (5 Fingers Has the Hand. With 5 You Seize the Enemy.).

Nearly ninety years later, and 8,000 miles away, the artist Calista Lyon began collecting short video clips of the residents of Green River, Utah, waving hello/goodbye for the camera. Only their hands and arms are visible in the camera frame, with mildly blurry backdrops of the rural town as a secondary character. The resulting silent seven-minute video, Localized Gestures, is a cheery catalog of greetings.

Bright, hazy, desert light cascades across each scene featuring grocery stores, homes, the Green River, Main Street, and other locales. There is not an archetypal Green River hand or wave. Lyon created the video “as a way to see this community together, to hold the nuance of each person through their own gesture.”³ The aggregated 173 vignettes (featuring 175 gestures), become a composite portrait of Green River and its variances. A pudgy toddler, withered senior, sno-cone shack worker, tattooed twenty-something, and hands with missing digits wave frantically back and forth, throw out three-fingered hails, rapidly open and close their mitts, and twiddle their fingers as part of the salutation parade. A single middle finger is jokingly jabbed in the air by an aged citizen as a humorous counterpoint.

Lyon grew up in a family of farmers in Tallangatta Valley, Australia. She recognized the similarities between her rural upbringing and the bucolic Green River. She wrote of her time in Epicenter’s Frontier Fellowship:

One thing I always love when I visit rural communities is that everyone greets one another. [. . .] Almost everyone knows everyone, a lot of people wave to one-another from their vehicles, as a kid I used to love to watch the different gestures of people’s waves from above the steering wheel. To this day, I love going to smaller communities where this is common practice.⁴

The symbolic gesture of a wave is a call-and-response that seeks reciprocation and connection. It is an acknowledgement of seeing and having been seen. By its nature, like a tango, waving takes two.

Lyon’s cavalcade of kindness rolled out in 2019 in the heart of Trump’s America. Amid national calls to return to civility, Lyon’s video is an example of the ingrained courtesy endemic to rural areas and the sense of communal familiarity. Small towns remove the sense of anonymity found in larger cities. Schools, churches, community organizations, and events create an environment for the mixing of classes and groups that might otherwise remain more homogeneous and bring them together in waves, handshakes, backslaps, and hugs.

Green River’s added layer is an economy tied to travel and tourism. Not only is the city friendly to insiders, but outsiders are welcomed into the community and its etiquette as well. Epicenter itself even plays that role—introducing artists from the outside to various social strata within the city.

Lyon’s finished work was projected after dark at a community picnic, on the sides of parked semi trailers that pulled off of Interstate 70, the exterior of a popular local restaurant, and a billboard visible to cars as they drove out of town. This project was made in part by the locals, primarily for the locals, with local symbolic gestures connecting and responding to one another as its subject. Placing the work into the public sphere reflects back to the locals a story of a generosity of spirit; and to those passing through, an invitation to engage with the community on friendly terms.

Although Heartfield and Lyon share a methodology of searching for and collecting images of hands, Heartfield’s hand of the oppressed aggressively reached for and discursively defined a political enemy, whereas Lyon’s hands welcome unity and solidarity. Heartfield sought an emblematic worker’s hand to highlight class division and power struggles, and Lyon’s collective video is not building an “us vs. them” narrative but just an “us.” Heartfield was engaged in agitprop, Lyon in what I call “civicprop.”

Civicprop mediates the bringing together of people, not in opposition to others, but in celebration of geographic proximity and situational commonalities. Lyon’s work in Green River, as well as other areas, falls into this category that is part social anthropology and part representational narrative that reflects back histories, characteristics, and stories to help archive and solidify collective civic identity.

Lyon’s Localized Gestures is a document of Green River in 2019, pointing to larger political climates, symbolic gestures, and the similarities and quirks of rural cultures. It is also a centerpiece of public pride and a clarion call to visit or stay. As a disseminated video, it is a postcard sharing the greetings of Green River with anyone who sees the video, anywhere in the world. With five or fewer fingers, it waves to you and hopes you wave back.