Brochure: Jim Denevan's Land Artwork in Nevada

Jim Denevan draws enormous geometric patterns into sand, dry lakebeds, and ice, using nothing but rakes, sticks, and his own footprints, knowing that tide, wind, or thaw will erase the work within days or hours. Filmmaker Peter Hinson follows him onto the cracked earth of a Nevada playa as he paces out lines and circles that can stretch for miles, visible in full only from above. The film stays close to the process rather than the artist's biography: the measuring, the walking, the slow accumulation of a pattern too large to see from ground level. Denevan talks through why he chooses impermanence over any lasting object, treating the erosion of each piece as part of the work rather than its loss. Aerial shots reveal the finished scale of drawings that look, from the ground, like nothing more than scuffed dirt. It is a short, quiet portrait of an artist whose medium disappears by design.