Corbin LaMont

Frontier Fellow April 2013

Website

Corbin LaMont has worked as an in-house designer for Wieden + Kennedy and Nike as well as projects for Intel, Facebook, Kleenex, The Portland Art Museum, Travel Portland, and American Express. You can find her looking for where magic happens. After her Fellowship in 2013, Corbin returned to Epicenter to paint a mural (2015) and to co-curate the A Call to Place: The First Five Years of the Frontier Fellowship exhibition and publication (2016).

“What are you doing?”

You are not the first to ask.

The tangibility of print brought me to my most recent work Desert West. I gathered, I collected, I researched, I wrote, I explored— themes emerged.

Digitally I kept scattered track of things on a blog entitled, It’s all happening. This came from my desire to share what I was doing immediately, Desert West must travel to you by mail or hand. It had to be edited, it had to be finessed. It’s all happening, gave me the freedom to track and share without such necessities.

Desert West is a travel guide of sorts. It hopes to inform and delight the reader, to help them do more than pass through. There are plenty of guides that give you the must stops, Desert West is there to help you discover. The content was guided by my experience here, and it was shaped by what I collected.

The introduction is called Home is a Waypoint below is an excerpt:

The future of town is flux, but perhaps it is just as in flux as it always have been. As long as the highway and the railroad stay, Green River will always be a waypoint. In the city archives there are binders on many of the families that have been here since the turn of the century. People have made their home here and they’re not planning on leaving anytime soon. The passer-throughs may see the abandoned buildings or slow streets, but if you live here, those things fade into the background and you just see home.

Desert West is the end of my time in Green River, but along the way there were other projects. I had the pleasure of teaching in the creative writing class at Green River High School about blogging. I created a blog titled Workshop to help teach them.

In my first week, I met John Hughes, an enthusiastic educator at Book Cliff Elementary. He created a project called Our Town with his students to help them learn and share about Green River. Armando Rios (Epicenter AmeriCorps VISTA) and I made him a six foot tall display from a paper model he made me.

I also mailed around forty postcards to spread the joy I was finding here in Green River.

I know I will return. Green River has left me with plenty of ideas. For now, the accumulation is in Desert West.