CHICAGO, IL.- Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago presents John Arndt, UIC alumnus MFA '93, Empire an At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago project, on view November 14 - December 23, 2006. In June and July, 2006 John Arndt spent several weeks at Wendover Airfield, Utah under the auspices of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The residency served as a base camp for excursions, some overnight, into a region extending from the Nevada border to Salt Lake City, and north almost to Idaho and south to the Dugway Proving Grounds.

Empire presents sculpture, video, photography and found items from Arndt's time in the Great Salt Lake Basin. A central element of the project is Gallery 400's publication and distribution of Arndt's audio compilation, Field Recordings from the Great Salt Lake Desert . The project, which shares a methodology with landscape painting, documentary film, and non-fictional travel writing, presents the desert as a place that provides a radically unique situation that most rarely encounter: an environment where silence can be approached, if not experienced.