Devin Farrand

Grounded, 2024

Evoking the commonplace landmark of rural landscapes, Devin Farrand’s Grounded (2024) honors the rhythmic passing of miles and time the artist finds on long drives between his studios in rural Idaho and Los Angeles. They are often the only sign of human intervention besides the road. Defining networks of agricultural and property boundaries, fence posts generate necessary order and structure. Farrand has come to admire their graceful simplicity—a fence post bears witness to the changing seasons, peeking out from blankets of snow in winter, entwined with fresh green growth in spring, and casting long straight shadows at dawn and dusk. A stoic sentinel weathered by the passage of time, Farrand’s Grounded represents the pace of life found in the mountain west gently entwined with the history of the monolith. Dating back to prehistorical sites like Stonehenge, monolithic forms placed into landscapes resurged in the 1970s as Land Art, emphasizing site specificity and performance—an artwork as an intervention into the environment, no longer reliant upon an institution or even a room. Farrand’s practice reflects on these histories, finding beauty in simple human gestures that survive the passage of time.