What Is This All About? 

Mystery Spot Books is a collaborative artist book publishing imprint by artist Chad Rutter and scholar Emily Roehl. The Energy Landscapes of St. Louis is a project that we began during a residency at St. Louis non-profit art center The Luminary. Through this project, we take our desire to engage with issues of energy production and climate change and ground it in a particular place: the St. Louis region. Besides being at the confluence of three major rivers, St. Louis is also the point at which a complex web of energy companies, power plants, geological features, waste sites, communities, and area histories connect. 

During our stay in the Gateway City, we worked with local photographer and Washington University professor Jennifer Colten. Over the last several years, Colten has photographed post-industrial sites throughout the area. Together, we conceived of the book Flood Plain Color Field, which explores a part of our energy consumption process typically unseen by the public, the residual monuments of energy waste that accumulate in the flood plains of rivers.

Why Is This Important? 

Now, more than ever, artists, writers, and other cultural creators need to illuminate the environmental realities of the people and places most affected by climate change and energy production. This book draws attention to one such site across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis, which hosts a decommissioned power plant and coal ash mound. By engaging with this landscape through photography, design, and writing, we want to draw attention not only to the histories of extraction in the region but to the persistent waste products that affect the health of human and ecological communities. 

As a standalone project, this book helps expose a wider audience to the work of Jennifer Colten and Mystery Spot Books. As the next edition in the Energy Landscapes series, this book is part of Mystery Spot's template for future work in other cities. Our vision is to grow this effort into an ongoing investigation of how a changing environment writ large can be understood aesthetically, historically, and materially in the landscapes of our everyday lives. Your help in funding this book will go a long way toward making this broader effort a reality.

What Will The Funding Do? What Will I Get In Return?

We've completed the shooting, designing, and writing components of our photobook, and now we're asking for $2500 to help us print a limited edition of Energy Landscapes of St. Louis No. 3: Flood Plain Color Field. Any funding over that goal will be used to help stage launch events in St. Louis, MO (where Jennifer lives), Minneapolis, MN (where Chad lives), and Austin, TX (where Emily lives).

In exchange for your support, depending on amount, you will get awesome Mystery Spot publications, and, of course, a fresh copy of Flood Plain Color Field. If you dig especially deep in the ol' couch cushions, there are other, special perks detailed to the right. Here are some examples of what you can get: 

Labadie Zine:

The Forest Poster (printed with coal ash)

Mound.AB. 9397, Jennifer Colten Limited Edition Print 1

Mound AB. 0119, Jennifer Colten Limited Edition Print 2

What Are Your Credentials? 

Jennifer Colten’s work focuses on ambiguous landscapes- sites at the margins of the urban environment, and spaces that reveal a resilience of ecological transformation. Central concerns within her photographic practice reflect questions surrounding the representation of landscape, and examine multiple issues revealing social, cultural, and environmental implications of land use.

After receiving her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Colten relocated to the Midwest to teach photography at Washington University Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

In addition to private collections, Colten’s photographs are included in institutions including The Museum für Fotographie, Braunschweig, Germany, Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Museo de Antioquia, and Bellas Artes Institute, both in Medellin, Colombia, the Centro Colombo Americano Institutions in Medellin and in Periera Colombia, South America.

jennifercolten.com

Emily Roehl is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the co-founder of Mystery Spot Books. Roehl's research is focused on the energy humanities, environmental justice, and contemporary art. In her dissertation, Roehl looks at landscape photographs of extractive sites from upstream to down in the material life of oil, from the tar sands of Alberta to the proposed routes of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines to the refineries of Illinois, Texas, and Louisiana. Roehl is interested in the aesthetic strategies of artists and activists who address the unevenly distributed risks of energy development.

mysteryspotbooks.com

Chad Rutter is an artist living and working in Minneapolis, MN. He makes work in a wide range of media exploring themes of place-based experience in the human-altered landscape. He received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His work as an individual artist has been exhibited locally and regionally in venues such as The Soap Factory and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. His work as Mystery Spot Books has exhibited nationally and internationally in events including the LA Art Book Fair, the Tokyo Art Book Fair, Photobook Melbourne, the Vancouver Art Book Fair and in numerous gallery exhibitions. Distributors include Printed Matter, Inc. in New York and Ti Pi Tin in London. Mystery Spot titles can be found in archives and collections including The Indie Photobook Library in Washington, D.C., the Midway Contemporary Art Library in Minneapolis, and the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

mysteryspotbooks.com

chadrutter.com

Are There Other Ways I Can Help?

Absolutely! If you like what we're doing, please tell other people about it! It takes just a couple of clicks to let other people know about this project on your social media site(s) of choice.