YUCCA VALLEY, Calif. — Housing prices have more than doubled in the last four years in Yucca Valley, a small desert town next door to the ever-popular Joshua Tree National Park. The entire region along the California State Route 62 highway has experienced a corresponding uptick in construction work that has multiplied the amount of junk being dumped in desolate areas of the desert, in addition to filling up junkyards.
Fitting, then, that Needles on the Floor at Compound Yucca Valley, the gallery’s first official sculpture show running through June 9, features a handful of works by self-taught artist Ethan Primason. “A lot of my studio process is informed by construction,” Primason told Hyperallergic. “Especially working with heavy material that I need to think about very practically, like, how can I move this when it needs to leave my shop?”
Materials like steel have become increasingly expensive across industries, particularly in construction. Since he moved to the high desert in 2020, Primason has collected bits and hunks of scrap from construction jobs and recycling centers, building up his tool collection and technical skill set — he taught himself to weld — along the way.
“I’ll work as much as I can on a job site for a few weeks to make enough money so I can just be in the studio for a week or so,” Primason told Hyperallergic. Primason dubs this toggling between the headspaces of construction and artmaking, as well as the intersections in the gestures and labor of construction and artmaking, “improvised labor.”
Primason puts the material elements of each sculpture through various iterations, he says. He works intuitively with no set plan for what a piece may look like, allowing the material to guide him to happy accidents and unintended outcomes that he views as alchemical transformations rather than mistakes.
Modernist shapes meet the rough edges of found objects like boulders, cement blocks, wood, wire mesh, and metal in the resulting works. The two rooms at Compound feel like a surreal interplay between a construction site and Brancusi’s atelier, fitting for Primason, who works as a handyman and welder in addition to being an artist.
“There were people from all generations at the opening, from little kids to adults, and everyone was interacting with the work in a different way,” Caroline Partamian, one of the co-founders of Compound, told Hyperallergic. Kids crawled under sculptures like “Chair” (2024) and “Rescue” (2024) and played with the rocks gathered on the floor.
“Ethan is not precious about people touching the art,” she added. “He is just happy if people are interacting with his work.”
Partamian, along with her co-founder Laura Wilson, attributes Compound’s growth since its founding in 2018 to a wave of Angelenos moving to the area, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, expanding the local artist community. But population growth is a double-edged sword: As of March of this year, housing costs are up 5.8% from a year ago. The median price of a house is $402,000, over double the median price in March 2019, when it was around $200,000.
According to Fabian, who identified himself by first name only and works at Venture Recycling, where Primason sources some of his materials, waste dumping has increased in the last three years — including the disposal of entire vehicles. Artists are especially fond of green and blue glass, steel bits, and blades, and come by frequently to collect junk for artwork.
“Two pieces in the show came from the same piece of steel that I found at a job site, and it was full of drill holes. So there was an actual limitation to how I could use it and it presented me with a challenge,” Primason told Hyperallergic. “How can I transform this thing that had this completely different previous life and is kind of compromised, and make something out of it?”
Primason’s mode of reworking rural detritus recalls the work of Noah Purifoy, whose Outdoor Desert Art Museum is only a 30-minute drive into the hills.
Like Purifoy, Primason gives discarded items new lives, working intuitively until he finds their new form. “I’m using a lot of found objects, but the goal isn’t to mask the object or make it seem like it’s something different than it is,” said Primason. “I don’t want to hide that it had been sitting in someone’s yard for 10 years, or was someone’s workbench — it’s just a reality of what I can afford and what I have access to.”
