The expansive space of western Oklahoma focuses the mind. The long vistas and the open landscape force the eye to find nuances, to locate small distortions and strange disruptions to the horizon, in order to clarify some sense of where it is and where it might have been. Variations within the endless plain of red clay, yellow and cracking grasses, and barren shrub stand out like beacons, and the mind memorizes, intuitively, an unusually large rock, a slight mound of earth, a broken branch swinging in a dry breeze. Each becomes a landmark. A signpost. A marker of memory and certainty and place. Each becomes, ultimately, a geographic pole around which our inner compass spins, quivers, and finally settles.
--Roger Thompson, from Memory and the Inner Landscape of Joshua Meier. Don't Take Pictures, Issue 1, Summer 2013.
