Where does the cornfield end?

Aerial view of a rural community surrounded by agricultural fields, orchards, and winding waterways, with white text overlaid across the landscape reading, “where does the cornfield end?”
Two wall-mounted digital monitors display contrasting landscape imagery: the left shows an aerial view of waterways and agricultural fields, while the right shows a close-up of dried grasses. Black cables hang beneath the screens.
Title
Where does the cornfield end?
Artist
Kevin Corcoran and Leslie Horwitz
Date
2025
Short Description
Kevin Corcoran and Leslie Horwitz’s multimedia installation began as an art-science study of an industrially farmed cornfield in Grayson, California. When the 2023 floods cut off access to the site, the project shifted to questions of access, biodiversity, and belonging, explored through film, sound, and participatory postcards.
Description
The project began at a diseased cornfield in Grayson, California, near where the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers meet. There, researchers were using environmental DNA (eDNA) to measure how a riparian buffer corridor, a strip of trees and shrubs planted along a waterway to filter runoff and support stream life, affects biodiversity around the industrially farmed field. In the winter of 2023, floods submerged the surrounding farmland and cut off access to the site. Residents and experts credited nearly 2,100 acres of nearby former farmland, largely restored to natural floodplain, with sparing the town from major damage. When the artists asked the river’s stewards for access to the land, they were told “There’s nothing there,” and the scientific research was put on hold.

Corcoran and Horwitz turned that pause into the project’s subject: a practice of trespassing, of looking for what is present when there is supposedly nothing to see, and of letting art and science cross-contaminate. Like eDNA sampling, which reveals traces of life not visible in a single encounter, their approach works across scales. Location sound is sampled, spliced, and sequenced into a layered portrait of place. Aerial drone footage shows the rhythms of the floodplain and the marks of human-made landscapes, while high-frame-rate, long-lens photography captures life on the ground up close. The installation pairs two films as a diptych, with original scores built from location recordings and a poetic voiceover drawn from the artists’ conversations with the site. Postcards extend the project into public participation, inviting viewers to send responses back or to pass its questions on to others.
Artwork Type
Film / Video
Installation
Environmental Art
Social Practice Art
Sound Art / Field Recording
Materiality
Audio / Sound
Paper
Video / Digital Video
Climate & Ecology Themes
Biodiversity and Species Loss
Industrial Agriculture
Soil and Subsurface Systems
Restoration and Regeneration
Concepts
Embodiment and the Senses
More-than-Human Relations
Place and Belonging
Ecological Domain / Habitat
Agricultural / Working Lands
River / Stream
Methods & Approaches
Art and Science Collaboration
Collaborative / Co-Creation
Community-Based Practice
Storytelling / Narrative Practice
Audience / Engagement Type
Public / General Audience
Geographic Scope
Site-Specific / Single Site
Rights
Rights held by artist or creator
Website
https://openlabresearch.com/where_does_the_cornfield_end/
Language
English
Item sets
California Art & Climate Archive
UC Santa Cruz
Media
Aerial view of a rural community surrounded by agricultural fields, orchards, and winding waterways, with white text overlaid across the landscape reading, “where does the cornfield end?”Kevin Corcoran and Leslie Horwitz, Where does the cornfield end? 1
Two wall-mounted digital monitors display contrasting landscape imagery: the left shows an aerial view of waterways and agricultural fields, while the right shows a close-up of dried grasses. Black cables hang beneath the screens.Kevin Corcoran and Leslie Horwitz, Where does the cornfield end? 2