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Exhibited at Mere Ubu Gallery, in September 2026, artist Caterina Piccardo will present 34.33510 N, 116.51420 W, a new landscape-based conceptual project unfolding in the Mojave Desert. The title itself refers to the exact geographic coordinates where the work takes place — a precise point in the vastness of the desert, transformed into a site of emotional memory, ritual, and longing.

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The project emerges from a previous body of work titled Venus After the Feminist Revolution, centered around the figure of a powerful woman reclaiming autonomy, identity, and physical strength. One painting in particular became the emotional origin of this new work: I Can Stand, portraying a naked, muscular woman standing alone, her fist clenched, confronting the world with radical independence and self-possession.

 

Yet 34.33510 N, 116.51420 W begins where certainty ends.

In this new chapter, the woman leaves the painting. She steps out of the symbolic space of representation and enters the real landscape of the Mojave Desert in search of her lost lover — a figure absent for years, perhaps forever. The desert becomes both physical territory and psychological condition: a place of isolation, revelation, endurance, and spiritual testing.

Throughout her journey, she plants flags across the landscape bearing fragments of language addressed to the missing lover:

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“THE WIND BROUGHT HERE BEFORE”
“DO YOU KNOW WHO GOT LOST FIRST”
“IF IT WASN’T FOR THE WIND THAT I LOST YOU”

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These messages function as traces, signals, and invitations. They are gestures of hope cast into emptiness, attempts to reconnect across distance and time. The wind itself becomes an invisible protagonist within the work — a force capable of separating, carrying away, but also guiding and returning.

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The flags are installed in a vast circular formation surrounding a central pile of large rocks. This sculptural center operates as a symbolic point of reunion: an imagined place where the lovers will eventually meet again. The circle suggests ritual, eternity, and return, while the rocks evoke permanence and the weight of emotional memory within an otherwise shifting landscape.

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Although the project originates from themes of feminine independence and empowerment, the work ultimately questions what may happen when strength becomes emotional isolation. The protagonist, after learning how to survive alone, discovers a deeper truth: independence does not erase the human need for connection. Her journey through the desert becomes not a rejection of strength, but an expansion of it — the realization that vulnerability, longing, and love can coexist with autonomy.

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The desert itself carries deep mythological and spiritual resonance. Across religious narratives and ancient symbolism, the desert represents the unknown — the place where identity is stripped bare and transformation becomes possible. Like Christ’s forty days in the wilderness confronting temptation and selfhood, the protagonist’s passage through the Mojave becomes a cathartic confrontation with absence, memory, and desire.

 

In searching for her lover, she is ultimately searching for herself.

34.33510 N, 116.51420 W exists between land art, performance, mythology, and emotional archaeology. It transforms the desert into a living narrative space where love, separation, and reunion are written directly onto the landscape itself.