Jan Estep, Grand Canyon Suicide Map/Metta Meditation, Grand Canyon National Park, four-color offset print, illustrated folded sheet map, 2012.
Grand Canyon Suicide Map/Metta Meditation
Grand Canyon Suicide Map/Metta Meditation, Grand Canyon National Park, four-color offset print, illustrated folded sheet map, 20″h x 39″w (unfolded), 10″h x 13″w (folded), 2012.
[2012] This illustrated map/poster documents the site-specific performative event Metta Meditation, Grand Canyon National Park and on the back the related topo map of all the known suicides in the Grand Canyon.
front
back
The most popular sections of the canyon to end one’s life are along the North and South Rims of Grand Canyon National Park, which are also the areas most frequented by tourists. In summer of 2011 I visited these accessible spots and offered metta or loving kindness meditation to those who had taken their lives there, offering the blessings to myself and others visiting the park as well, a private gesture made public. People come to this natural wonder to be amazed and they come here to die, the same landscape viewed from emotionally and experientially opposite extremes. Like so much of our lives these personal and historical secrets saturate the landscape but often remain hidden from view. Images on front, clockwise from top left, show photo documentation from Lipan Point, The Abyss, Pima Point, Hermits Rest, Shoshone Point, and Powell Point.
During exhibition the poster is stacked and given away freely to visitors.
Grand Canyon Suicide Map, digital inket print, map pins, 39″h x 86″w, 2011, and Grand Canyon Suicide Map/Metta Meditation, Grand Canyon National Park, four-color offset print, illustrated folded sheet map, 2012, exhibited in “Shadows, Traces, Undercurrents,” Katherine E. Nash Gallery, UMN, Minneapolis, October 16 to November 17, 2012