Steven Durland: Inflation Gauge

STEVEN DURLAND: Inflataion Gauge January 31–February 14, 2026

Steven Durland’s art practice originates with the performance art maxim of “Art as Life.” Though the images he creates are static, they exist in the world as performance does—site specific, unique images that capture an instant in time and space, an environment, and the essence of being in and within our deeper natures. For Durland, who edited High Performance from 1986 to 1994 and co-edited the magazine with his partner Linda Frye Burnham from 1995 to 1997, private life has never been far from the creation of art. He describes how the magazine’s founder Burnham and publisher Susanna Bixby Dakin approached him to take over editorial duties: “I said I could only do it if I could treat it as a work of art.” As an early adopter of digital imaging tools and strategies, Durland did exactly that, treating magazine writing and production as creative inspiration. 

Durland describes how in 1986 he interviewed legendary performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay for High Performance, who shared sage wisdom about the life stages of the artist: “They said artists go through four phases: warrior phase, priest phase, lover phase, and finally the gardener.” Durland sees himself and Burnham as inhabiting this gardener phase of creation. “The Tree of Life,” as Abramovic called it. In recent decades, Durland and Burnham have relocated to Frog Pond Farm in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, where they raise chickens and maintain a property populated by thousands of trees. In these works begun in 2015, of which Inflation Gauge is one series, he scans objects such as eggs or leaves directly on a flatbed scanner, then enhances the printed images with beeswax coating and frames fashioned from found wood located on the farm. Durland and Burnham have created the Woodland Banners Poetry Walk throughout their property, which juxtaposes his digital imagery, displayed as banners within the landscape, and her poetic responses to prompts combining sites on their land and historical artists whom Durland has correlated with specific locations. 

The egg is an economic indicator or “inflation gauge,” meaning that the price of eggs tells us something about the relative health of our economy. Egg prices have drastically increased since Durland printed these images in 2016, when a dozen eggs cost $1.68. Today, the national average is $2.71 according to the U.S. Inflation Calculator. The egg has a double meaning, being both the beginning of life and a familiar means to a nourishing end. Philosophers Deleuze and Guattari celebrate the egg because it has no distinguishing features on the inside, being an amorphous mass surrounded by a thin, hard shell membrane. In A Thousand Plateaus, they invite us to become “the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs,” a vestigial version of ourselves free of the “program” of modern capitalist life. 

While the chickens of Frog Pond Farm may be a long way from 1980s Paris where Deleuze and Guattari wrote of becoming “the tantric egg,” the imperative to dispense with a conformist program for life is one that Durland shares with his French counterparts. Performance art represents that becoming-as-unbecoming in all its unwieldy forms.

High Performance: A 2-Year Conference is a multi-year (2025–2027) series of programs in the form of an extended conference and related programs and exhibitions dedicated to High Performance magazine, the first international art magazine devoted exclusively to performance art. The publication was based in Los Angeles and published quarterly issues from 1978-1997. This series is designed to highlight High Performance's enduring impact and the artists and writers who contributed to its legacy and its role in shaping the history of performance. 

Institutional partners include 18th Street Arts Center, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Highways Performance Space, and the Performance Art Museum, along with various education partners.