East Jesus (original) (raw)

East Jesus is an experimental, sustainable, habitable art installation started by Charlie Russel in 2006. East Jesus is a sprawling 30 acre museum dedicated to large-scale art. We charge no admission and rely solely upon small donations that fund our mission to preserve, protect, and continue the work of Charlie Russell. Our artist residency program gives up to a dozen low-income artists at time the space, tools, and supplies to create permanent large scale works using reclaimed materials. A member of the California Association of Museums and the only registered art museum in Imperial County, we welcome thousands of guests per week to see the possibilities of a world without waste where every action has the potential for self expression.

In 2014, we formed the Chasterus Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit; in 2016 we purchased our land from the state of California with the intent to keep Charlie’s dream alive and to inspire others to see a life for their waste beyond the landfill.

Together, the inhabitants of East Jesus and offsite members provide a refuge for artists, musicians, survivalists, writers, scientists, laymen and other wandering geniuses.

We are dedicated to providing a working model of an improbable improvised community at the edge of the world. We are most interested in low-tech solutions, unresolved theories, non-linear advancement, and creative reuse.

We strive to document the results of these endeavors, sometimes simply by their existence. Our documents are sometimes nails, concrete, and sweat. We are partially an exhibition space for those problematic projects taking up your warehouse space, partially a build space for those problematic projects taking up the desert.

One of our guiding philosophies is “do as thou wilt”; another is “do no harm”.

The Chasterus Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization for public benefit that operates an experimental, sustainable, educational art installation called East Jesus. East Jesus lies less than a mile past the legendary bastion of southern California folk art, Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain. Charlie Russell, the founder of East Jesus, initially came to the area to work alongside Knight, and quickly became enamoured with the idea of “The Last Free Place.” In early 2007, Charlie left his tech job, packed all his belongings into a shipping container, and began to surround his two art cars with the sculptures that would become the foundation works of East Jesus. The labyrinthian central complex he constructed houses administrative, operations, and hospitality facilities, as well as a musical performance space with a studio grand piano, PA, and stage lighting system. Since his passing in 2011, a board of directors has guided the curation and expansion of East Jesus, honoring his vision of a sustainable, habitable, ever-changing art installation. That board of directors was formalized with the creation of the Chasterus Foundation, in order to protect and continue his vision. The installation includes pieces from artists of note including Royce Carlson, Mirabelle Jones, Angelina Christina, Ben Wolf, The Hive Collective, Christian Hernandez, and Shing Yin Khor. We provide a permanent home following temporary installations for gallery shows and art festivals, allowing large-scale works that might otherwise be lost to continue to be viewed by the public.

The name East Jesus is a colloquialism for the middle of nowhere beyond the edge of services; there is no religious connotation. Located a few hours east of Los Angeles near the Salton Sea, our off-grid facility operates with no municipal utility services. The Imperial Valley, which has no museum for the arts, has scarce few arts facilities of any kind; the majority of those handful are attached to educational institutions. An art installation made from discarded material that has been reused, recycled, or repurposed, East Jesus encourages visitors to imagine a world without waste in which every action is an opportunity for self-expression. Assemblage and mixed-media art covers nearly every inch of the interior and exterior of the operations and hospitality facilities. Sculptures and installations are constantly in development throughout the campus. Photography, multi-media arts, performance art, writing, and music are an integral part of the larger fabric which the collective artists in residence are continually weaving. East Jesus is a living, growing, and ever-changing artwork that embraces the varied voices of the thousands of contributing artists who have added to the installation in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The primary purpose of the curators and the artists in residence is to maintain and protect this unique collaborative canvas for the enjoyment, expression, and inspiration of artists of all mediums.

As part of the Chasterus Foundation’s core mission to protect, preserve, and grow East Jesus, we welcome visitors and artists daily for guided tours showcasing not only our sustainability initiatives and the art on display, but encourage them to participate. We welcome overnight guests from as close as a few miles away to as far away as the other side of the globe to stay with us and experience creative sustainable living; short-term artist residencies can span from a weekend to a season. The Chasterus Foundation strives to provide a safe space at East Eesus where artists can freely explore, learn, and create, whether by themselves or in collaboration with others in an environment of mutual respect. By creating a safe space, we take away any stigma attached to failure, as failing is how we learn. We create a place where women can express themselves in any way without the stigmatizations, expectations and attacks of modern culture. We create a microcosm where those who fall through the cracks of the modern world may thrive.

The Chasterus Foundation is actively engaged in various creative re-use explorations; our vision of a world without waste extends from artistic re-imagining to “Re-use Before Recycle” for large stationary industrial back-up batteries, which are recycled with up to 80% of their usable capacity. Battery recycling is fundamentally inefficient, consuming scarce resources in the disposal and re-manufacturing processes. While no longer useful for commercial applications, the remaining reserve capacity has immense potential for providing green power to traditionally under-funded and under-served communities. Re-use Before Recycle has the potential to provide reliable power and immense cost savings to organizations typically unable to raise the capital funding to convert to renewable energy, such as NGOs, community service providers, and rural villages in developing nations. Re-use Before Recycle ensures that batteries provide the maximum possible benefit prior to recycling. Additionally, dozens of megawatts of usable solar panels are removed from service every year due to commercial and residential redevelopment, upgrading, and minor or cosmetic damage. We are currently gathering data on a bank of 85 panels scrapped from a solar farm due to minor damage and diminished capacity in order to be able to assess the usefulness of panels that are at commercial end-of-life. Much like batteries, photovoltaic solar panels experience degradation over time and use and are retired from service despite their ability to produce power, albeit at a lower voltage than at the time of initial manufacture. Additionally, thousands of solar panels are cracked in transportation or installation every year, and typically discarded even though they still produce as much as 90% of their rated power. By exploring the edge of usefulness, The Chasterus Foundation seeks to reduce consumption of scarce resources while simultaneously enabling quality of life improvements for underserved populations.
The experimentation that we engage is in not limited to batteries and PV panels. We have developed a combined system for simultaneously composting food waste and curing and breaking down human waste into rich soil. This soil is then mixed with native earth to provide nourishment for our organic garden, that flourishes in an environment that was previously considered barren without the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and GMOs. Our waste nourishes our gardens, which in turn nourish residents and guests. Water conservation measures include using shower water and laundry wash water to irrigate fruit trees, while drip irrigation allows us to grow vegetables with less water than conventional irrigation methods, even in extreme summer heat. Scraps of wood, Straw bales, and Styrofoam are transformed into stable, insulated living spaces, which are sheathed in cobb (an ancient building material made of clay, sand and straw), and sealed from the environment. We then rigorously test these structures in order to create a repeatable blueprint for safe building practices with scrap materials. We are testing concepts such as filling tires with a cobb mixture to sun dry into an abode brick, which sidesteps the preventative amount of intensive labor that rammed earth filled tires require. Then creating walls, foundations, and soil stabilization out of these bricks, comparing them to the data available on rammed earth filled tires. These low technology solutions synergize with high technology ones, but only when you look at the system creativity. We are looking to experiment with wood gasification, a 19th century technology, as another link in the power chain that has an ancillary usefulness when considered systemically. The waste gas from a gasifier is mostly water, with some carbon dioxide, but by running this waste gas through a condensing coil, we can condense pure water for potable and agricultural uses, as well as enrich the air around our organic garden with cool carbon dioxide. Using out composting and humanure techniques, we can ensure that the soil in which the garden is planted is rich with nitrogen compounds. With enriched soil, enriched air, and a new water source, we have a system that can make our plants grow 3 times as large and as fast and whose only waste product is energy.

This is the synergy of art and technology that the Chasterus Foundation engages in at East Jesus. We push our concepts of what is possible with art installations, then use those concepts to develop safe, energy efficient building practices. We combine modern, low technology sanitation with organic farming and power generation deemed obsolete to push the boundaries of the possibilities of food and water production, without relying on synthetic fertilizers or copyrighted genetically modified organisms. We look at what industry and companies throw away as not worth their time to create power solutions for long-term food storage, light, and connectivity. All these things create a system that is greater than the sum of its parts, just as our art is greater than the sum of the tires, rusted metal and other flotsam and jetsam that was used to create it. If we are successful, we can spread this system around the world, to communities in developing nations that lack these basic fundamentals, or that are also far beyond the range of services. We see a world in which creativity and art are a daily part of people’s lives, where they have the resources to build future out of the scraps of policies that set out to exploit them and the surrounding resources. We seek to inspire people to see beyond what something is, and instead see what it can be, just as Charlie Russell did when he looked over the desolate field of long abandoned scrap metal and wood that he turned into East Jesus.

Remote as it is, East Jesus does not exist in a vacuum but in the crossroads of high concept and low technology, low culture and high art, radicalized self and idealized society. Its smallest parts are a measure of study, reflection, and deliberate and methodical action — the vibrations of the secret knots that bind the world. It is designed to create access to the emergent and the near-extinct, bringing uncertain futures to the fearless present for the boldest of thinkers, schemers, dreamers, and doers. A short boat ride from the desert of the mind to the desert of the real, where the discarded and hidden and not-meant-to-be are unearthed in the light of day and remade into a bright shining zero history.

Itself a reworking of the waste products of post-industrial excess, East Jesus is a place for those who continuously interact with and remake the world around them. It is the nexus of a sweeping wave of artists, musicians, photographers, inventors, travelers, and other assorted rebels and rogues and sworn brothers and sisters. It is a performance space for an aerialist troupe, a rest stop for a band on tour, the midnight testing ground of a sleep-deprived engineer, or the final resting place of a decaying art exhibit. It is a waypoint between cities, gigs, careers, love lives. It is the place a friend tries to tell you about after emerging wide-eyed from the desert one early morning — the place far from the skylines, past the mountain, beyond the edge of the pavement, up the dried river, surrounded by spent shells and shivering sand.