When the Desert Speaks Back

By Kristine Schomaker Monica Marks has been driving past abandoned homesteads for years. Windows down, camera in the passenger seat, watching these ghost structures blur by like memories you can't quite catch. But this year something shifted. She stopped the car.

What happened next becomes Abandoned, her solo show opening October 25th at Los Angeles Art Association. It's also her 60th birthday, which feels intentional. Like she's been collecting the pieces of this work her whole life and finally has permission to put them together.

Monica's work has always lived in the space between psychology and art. Her 2021 solo exhibition What We Hide: An Exploration of Hidden Disabilities and Identity wasn't just about making visible what society prefers to ignore—it was about her own relationship with disclosure, with the exhausting performance of appearing "normal." The show used her studio as gallery space during pandemic restrictions, creating an intimacy that felt necessary. Visitors weren't just viewing art; they were entering someone's creative sanctuary, witnessing vulnerability in real time.

That same willingness to let people inside continues with Abandoned. She will construct a Jackrabbit Homestead inside the gallery. You'll be able to walk through it. Touch the walls tagged with graffiti. Watch the desert sunset she recorded projected behind it—this gorgeous contradiction of hope against decay. The sounds she captured out there will play too, wrapping you in the actual atmosphere of these forgotten places.

The homesteads she photographs were built through the Small Tract Act of the 1950s and 60s. Five-acre parcels handed out to anyone willing to build a home and try to make something grow in that harsh landscape. Most people lasted a few years before the desert won. The cabins remain, slowly becoming part of the earth again, canvases for teenagers with spray paint and shelter for people society has also abandoned.

Monica sees the connection. Her background in marital and family therapy means she understands abandonment as both personal wound and social issue. The fear that sits in your chest when someone leaves. The way we discard communities, people, dreams when they become inconvenient. How spaces hold the emotional residue of what happened there.

During her residency at Desert Dairy, she let the landscape guide her process instead of forcing predetermined concepts. (This is hard for those of us who love control.) She started painting images on the top half of panels and attaching found objects from the same location on the bottom half. "Abe's Truck" was the first piece created this way, and it sold immediately at Bird Dog Arts gallery. The desert was teaching her something about combination, about letting disparate elements speak to each other.

Photo by Cathy Immordino

When she left the residency, her car held a camera full of images and a bag full of objects. She could continue the work anywhere—her home studio, her DTLA space. The desert had given her a language she could carry.

Abandoned will include photographs of the homesteads, the mixed media panels that combine painting with found objects, and installation pieces using only items discovered near the structures. Everything in the show will have been touched by that landscape, shaped by abandonment and persistence.

But this isn't grief pornography. Monica isn't romanticizing decay or turning someone else's loss into aesthetic pleasure. She's asking what it means to reclaim what's been left behind. How we might transform abandonment from source of shame into invitation for something new.

The show will parallel the criminalization of unhoused communities with the way we label abandoned structures "dangerous" and demolish them. Both responses eliminate rather than address. Both refuse to see potential in what's been discarded.

Monica's work creates space for different seeing. The graffiti becomes collaboration across time. The sunset mural becomes promise that beauty persists despite neglect. The found objects become materials for new making.

Art therapy training shapes how she approaches both personal and social healing. Expression creates possibility for growth, for integration of difficult experiences. Making something from what's been broken doesn't erase the breaking—it acknowledges damage while refusing to let damage be the final word.

Abandoned opens on her birthday because turning 60 in this culture means confronting your own relationship with being discarded. With becoming invisible. With watching dreams you carried dissolve in the face of practical limitations. Monica is choosing celebration instead of disappearance, creation instead of resignation. She's bringing the desert inside—not just the objects and images, but the sounds, the light, the feeling of standing in a place where time moves differently.

The desert taught her that survival looks different than we imagine. That persistence doesn't always mean staying put. Sometimes it means learning to carry what matters and leave the rest for someone else to find and transform.

Her invitation to the opening includes the phrase "you know you have to come." It's playful but also true. We need witnesses for this kind of courage. For work that refuses to look away from what's difficult while insisting on the possibility of beauty, connection, meaning.

The abandoned homesteads of Wonder Valley are still there, still weathering, still becoming something other than what they were meant to be. Monica's work suggests this transformation might be the point. That abandonment, while painful, creates space for new kinds of inhabiting.

Abandoned opens October 25th and runs through November at Los Angeles Art Association. Bring your own relationship with being left behind. See what the desert has to say about it.

Selfie during her recent residency