Way back in 2013 I made a pilgrimage deep into the California desert to visit Pioneertown, an old western town created in 1946 by a group of Hollywood film makers and the legendary actors Roy Rogers and Gene Autry as an authentic looking set for Westerns. It was great fun to walk around a real looking frontier town pretending that I was John Wayne for a day. That was, until I discovered something rather odd on the outskirts of town.
It seems that I wondered right out of the old west straight into the Twilight Zone.
Just beyond the saloon and horse stables sits an open spot of land filled with some of the most unusual objects. There is a row of school desks with old typewriters on them, there is a statue of a Hindu Goddess surrounded by seashells, there is a broken porcelain image of the Virgin Marry delicately placed in the sand, there is a cat statue with coins where its eyes should be, and there is a large collection of pottery and small statues pilled together to form something that from far away looks like a pile of junk, but close up you can see that each object was placed deliberately to make an artistic statement.
I walked around and spent time photographing and meditating on each display. Everyone sees art differently, things like this have different interpretations depending on how the viewer interprets what they see. What I got from this collection of work was that the artist was trying to make a contrasting statement about faith and the material world. The Hindu and Buddhist statues stood strong and in perfect condition compared to the detreating man made creations around them. Likewise Jesus and the Virgin Mary are featured alongside objects turning to dust around them. In the end faith will be around long after the works of man will have passed away.
That's what I got out of it anyway.
You, of course, may see something different in these images that I captured that day. That's the wonderful thing about art.
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If you have ever traveled on California State Route 62 from Palm Springs to Yucca Valley you may have noticed a small sign off the highway pointing towards a road leading to something called Pioneertown. I used to drive past that sign once a week and wondered just what the heck Pioneertown actually was? One day the curiosity finally got the best of me and I veered off the main road and began a journey down a lonely desert road towards my unknown destination.
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