Candy / A Good and Spacious Land

This is a two volume publication by Jim Goldberg (Candy) and Donovan Wylie (A good and spacious land).
Wylie produced A Good and Spacious Land as Doran Artist in Residence at the Yale University Art Gallery, which published the work in book form and exhibited it at the museum in 2017. A Good and Spacious Land documents the reconstruction of the i95 interstate and defence highway interchange in New Haven, Connecticut, as research towards understanding mythologies of territorial expansion and “chosen people” ideologies within American history. The title refers to the Old Testament promise made to Moses and ties to New Haven’s legacy of Puritan exceptionalism, arms manufacturing (including the Winchester rifle, the “gun that won the West”), and “model city” urban planning. A key element of the research was the westward expansion of Connecticut through the Western Reserve – including the founding of Cleveland by Moses Cleveland, a Connecticut native and Yale graduate – and the corresponding highway interchange in Portland, Oregon, near the end of Lewis and Clark’s trail, that was designed by another Moses, Robert Moses – also born in New Haven, and also a graduate of Yale. Although the vast majority of the photographs in A Good and Spacious Land were made in New Haven, it includes a small number of interstate pictures from Cleveland and one from Oregon.

A Good and Spacious Land develops Wylie’s practice which is driven by the pursuit of alternative strategies for the representation of conflict. Utilizing a combination of conceptual and typological approaches, his work asks us to consider the role of photography within the contexts of preservation, memory and history.