A new exhibit built around the idea of distance has landed at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center in downtown Mobile, bringing five artists from across three states together under one roof for the first time in the Port City. The show, titled “East 7,” is the work of Land Report, an artist collective whose members live and work hundreds of miles apart yet share a common creative language rooted not in geography, but in shared themes. That structure — a group held together by ideas rather than a shared hometown — is what gives the exhibition its unusual shape and its sense of reunion.
“We’re everywhere,” said Land Report artist Brian Jobe, describing the collective’s unusual structure. Jobe and fellow member Jason Brown are based in Tennessee, while Leticia Bajuyo, who once lived in Indiana, now teaches at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. The remaining three members of the group, Dave Jones, Pat Kikut and Shelby Shadwell, all live and work in Laramie, Wyoming. The roster stretches more than a thousand miles from end to end, from the Gulf Coast of Texas to the high plains of southeastern Wyoming, yet the members have kept exhibiting together through years of joint shows.
A collective defined by ideas, not addresses
Land Report’s scattered arrangement is the reason the group exists at all. Rather than forming around a city, a university or a gallery district, the members organized around a set of concerns that follow them wherever they work: landscape, memory, distance and the way people assign meaning to the objects around them. That structure has practical advantages. Members can pursue teaching jobs, residencies and commissions in different states without dissolving the group, and each new exhibition becomes a meeting point where work produced in isolation is set against the rest.
Jobe splits his time between his own art practice and his role as executive director and co-founder of Tri-Star Arts, a Tennessee-based contemporary arts organization based in Nashville. Under his leadership, the organization runs exhibitions, artist talks and grant programs, and is preparing a statewide exhibition called the Tennessee Triennial. Tri-Star Arts has also placed a pair of sculptures by artist Hank Willis Thomas along the Memphis waterfront, part of its broader effort to move contemporary art out of the gallery and into public view across Tennessee.
Despite living in different states, the members of Land Report share deep roots in Knoxville, Tennessee. Brown was Jobe’s undergraduate instructor at the University of Tennessee, and the two later became peers, mounting joint exhibitions together nearly a decade ago. Bajuyo is also a University of Tennessee graduate, finishing her degree around the same time Jobe began his studies there. Jones, meanwhile, studied under Brown as a graduate student and completed his Bachelor of Studio Art degree alongside Jobe. The Knoxville years left the group with the kind of shared training that makes a scattered collective workable — a common vocabulary of materials, critique and exhibition practice.
Jones has since built a long-running creative partnership with Kikut and Shadwell, regularly exhibiting alongside them. “Our work just always seems to fit together in the same room, so we’re just going to keep riding the wave,” Jobe said of the group’s ongoing collaboration. That instinct — to keep putting the work side by side until the logic of the pairing becomes visible — has carried the collective through years of group shows even as careers, teaching posts and zip codes pulled the members apart.
How East 7 reached the Gulf Coast
The collective’s path to Mobile traces back to Alabama Contemporary Art Center Executive Director Elizabet Elliott’s earlier work at the Mobile Museum of Art, where she first came across Land Report’s work while following another exhibition. She was drawn to the group’s concept: an artist collective defined not by where its members live, but by the ideas connecting their work. “A big part of my job is to stalk and creep on artists,” Elliott said. “I saw their name somewhere, maybe part of an exhibition I was following, but loved the idea of a collective that’s not based on geographic location but based on themes in their work.”
After Elliott took on a curatorial role at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center, she reached out to the group in early 2019. The connection deepened after both parties learned they had recently become regional regranting partners with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, setting the stage for the collaboration that ultimately brought the exhibit from the Smoky Mountains to the Gulf Coast. The overlap mattered. Regional regranting programs put discretionary funding in the hands of local arts organizations, and two organizations drawing from the same well could plan an ambitious project without chasing separate approval for every step.
The show arrived in downtown Mobile after months of coordination across three states, with work from Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming converging on a gallery on Conti Street. For a group that rarely occupies the same room, an install week functions as a working reunion: crates open, members adjust placements together, and the exhibition takes the shape it will keep through the fall.
Six practices, one conversation
Each artist in Land Report brings a distinct focus to the collective’s work. Bajuyo explores what she describes as “perceptions of value,” using her art to examine how social amnesia shapes consumer behavior — how communities forget the origins of the objects they buy, keep and discard, and what that forgetting costs them. Brown’s work is influenced by the politics of mountaintop removal, the surface mining practice that has reshaped ridgelines and watersheds across Central Appalachia and made the landscape itself a contested political subject.
Jones is drawn to desert environments, working through experimental interactions, model-scale sculpture and large outdoor installations. Kikut’s paintings explore horizon lines, often drawing on flat Midwestern landscapes as inspiration, and Shadwell works with ephemeral imagery pulled from highway road cameras, mining operations and the optical effects of salt flats, translating them into drawing, sculpture and video installation. Taken together, the members’ subjects form a loose map of the American interior — deserts, plains, ridgelines and shorelines — observed by artists scattered across it.
The variety is deliberate. Because the collective binds itself to themes rather than technique, no two members are expected to make work that looks alike. What the gallery is meant to reward instead is attention: a viewer who walks the room slowly will find the same questions about distance, value and memory echoed across materials and media, from artists who have never shared a studio.
Art that asks the body to move
Jobe’s own contribution to the show centers on movement and physical engagement, with pieces designed to draw viewers along specific pathways through the gallery. “If a sculpture asks something of you or invites a certain footpath, it engages your muscle memory,” Jobe said. “So, if you have a big art day, see a lot of work like during a day in New York City, and there’s almost like sensory overload, you may be more likely to remember pieces that ask your body to do something.” The idea is a quiet argument against the passive glance: a work that makes a visitor step around, under or through it claims a place in memory that a picture on a wall rarely earns.
That philosophy is on display in Jobe’s piece “Mirror Extended (5),” one of three of his works featured in the Mobile show. The installation consists of fifteen found window screens standing in a row, separated by pavers chalked to create a color spectrum that flows from one end of the piece to the other. Visitors do not simply look at the row; they walk alongside it, and the chalked pavers turn the stroll into a reading of color, one step and one shade at a time.
Another Jobe work in the exhibit, “Hot Wells,” incorporates a geographic and geologic element of local origin, engaging visitors on a more sensory, barefoot level. The piece extends the collective’s habit of borrowing directly from landscape, and it gives Mobile audiences a work that invites contact rather than observation from a distance.
Planning a visit
“East 7” is on view at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center, located at 301 Conti Street in downtown Mobile, through Oct. 23. The exhibit marks the latest in a string of shows that have brought new artists and fresh perspectives to the gallery since Elliott took the helm, part of a broader effort to keep the venue’s programming in faster rotation and introduce local audiences to voices from beyond the region.
The center’s Conti Street building sits in the heart of downtown Mobile, blocks from the Saenger Theatre and the restaurants and galleries that line the Dauphin Street corridor, making it an easy stop for an afternoon or an evening out. For Mobile audiences, the show offers something the region rarely stages: a single room where the work of five artists from three states can be read as one ongoing conversation about landscape, distance and value.
For the members of Land Report, meanwhile, the Gulf Coast stop continues an experiment in how a collective can function without a hometown. The group’s answer, so far, has been to let the work do the gathering — to send paintings, sculpture and installation down the highways that separate the members and see whether the room holds together. In Mobile, at least through late October, it does.