SANTA FE — I didn’t take pictures when I visited SITE Santa Fe to see the show Deserted Conquest, by Hans Schabus and this one from the website is almost misinformation.

You had to be there. My companion and I walked in the door, chatted with the staff, and I felt like the place had gone into disrepair. Already, I had been unnerved because the huge parking lot to the south, where the Farmer’s Market was usually held, had been fenced off and confined SITE to a strip mall amount of parking. The last time we’d been to SITE the roof had been leaking, and now, I was looking at exposed pipes and electrical wires — a big black wall was pushing itself at me, and I’d just walked in the door.

My companion said, “it’s a trailer."

I thought he’d read something in the brochure he’d picked up, and then he pointed to the axles.

House trailer. Mobile home. The bottom of a manufactured dwelling — wheels and gas lines protruding, created an enormous, confrontational, black wall by sitting on its edge.

We walked around the end of the trailer frame, and into the big, open gallery space, where one wall was covered by what seemed to be abstract paintings, toward the center pointed out by a 4-foot steel chandelier with white candles and piles of melted wax below on the floor. Before we got to the center of the room, we figured out what the abstract paintings on the wall actually were — the carpet in the trailer home.

Everything had been striped from the bed of the trailer home, down to the floor covering. There were bits of metal that signified some kind of modern convenience, better looking carpet in places where no one walked and the snail paths of human living patterns.

In another hallway, the artist had installed part of the ceiling on a large part of another wall, obviously recognizable because of lamp fixtures and vents, but I kept looking back at the carpet, the wall of abstraction.

The artist is Austrian, and was obviously amazed by the deserted feeling of New Mexico, and had filled another huge gallery space with four to 10-inches of red-brown New Mexico dirt. In another room, he just installed the door from the post office in the town that starred in the three-screen video in the next gallery. The video showed the people-less landscape of the town of Yeso, New Mexico, and a train roaring past. The train no longer stopped and the town was abandoned. I couldn’t help but return to the room with the trailer.

We, who live in the west, don’t need a floor of dirt to know what it feels like to walk on New Mexico clay.* We don’t need a video — in three disjointed parts — we’ve seen it. So Mr. Austrian Artist, you missed, but man, you hit. I have never had such a strong feeling of being overwhelmed with sudden understanding of something I had not known before as I had seeing the trailer home.