SARA J. FRANTZ
Quit the Neighborhood

Travel, landscape, and nature are always the driving force in my work. Quit the Neighborhood is my most recent collection of drawings based on the raw landscapes of Iceland and West Texas. These graphite on paper drawings, coin-sized homes isolated on white paper, started in the summer of 2008 while attending a residency in a small fishing village on the north side of Iceland. I was overwhelmed by the ineffable grandeur of Icelandic landscape. Between the harsh beauty and lack of trees, the only markers of space were the clusters of homes. I omit all vegetation, focusing on the man-made, to emphasize what is not drawn. The houses are the only sense of scale on the otherwise scale-less nature. On returning to Austin, I traveled to West Texas, a landscape that feels similar in grandiosity to that of Iceland, for research to continue this series. This summer, I traveled to Pacific Northwest with similar intentions. The starkly different settings are linked in my mind because of the ruggedness and isolation of the landscapes themselves, and the pioneers that originally dotted this humbling magnitude that I now map.