My Favorite Dirt Roads. 1969. set of 17 c-prints. edition of 8
each sheet: 11 3/8 x 11 3/8 in/ 29 x 29 cm
each image: 10 3/8 x 10 3/8 in/ 26 x 26 cm

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My Favorite Dirt Roads, 1969, consists of seventeen eleven-inch-square photographs, which hang side-by-side at eye level, so that one
might have, in KINMONT’s words, “the experience of standing and looking down a road, which opens your mind in a way nothing else does.”

ROBERT KINMONT avoids aesthetic virtuosity—he meant for My Favorite Dirt Roads to be “amateurish and a bit overexposed”—and combines method and subject matter to generate points of entry and discovery for viewers. The artist illuminates the range of association one of the roads contains:

This is my favorite dirt road. It goes up to Buttermilk and is mostly washboard and straight. It’s a modern dirt road, wider than most dirt roads. You can do fifty miles an hour on it. It’s sandy on the sides.

I learned to drive on it and we used to go up it in the winter to count deer and hunt cottontail rabbits. I’ve ridden a horse up it and walked down it and lost a wounded deer by it and watched miners set dynamite charges to improve it.

I’ve looked for chucker partridge, shot at quail, doves, done water colors of the rocks beside it under the trees over it, know one of the only unclaimed springs by it and watched mountain lions run away from it.

It leads to a road that goes to hanging valley mine behind the top of Mount Tom, to Horton Lakes, to the artists’ cabin, to the beaver ponds, to the place where they count deer in the winter, to the cattle guard, to the miners’ cabin, to the top of the sand canyon, to the Basin Mountain Mining road, to the Rocking Chair Ranch, and starts from one of the only recorded spots of a battle between Paiutes and Whites, almost exactly where the stream that crosses the desert from Bishop Creek leads to the ranch where I grew up.

Californian artist ROBERT KINMONT participated in his first exhibition in 1966. In mid 1970s he decided to stop making art. During this time he established his own school, studied Buddhism and worked as a carpenter. This hiatus continued until he began making work again in 2005. Alexander and Bonin, New York recently presented his first solo exhibition since 1981, showing works from 1964 to 1975 and from 2005 to 2009.