Stallings has written essays for numerous contemporary art exhibitions, has edited several books, and has been a columnist for print and online journals. He writes about artists who are highly engaged with their political, social, and ecological environment. His personal essays often take a What If? speculative perspective.
SELECTED PERSONAL ESSAYS from JOURNALS
Chronologically ordered beginning with most recent
THE YUCCA PEOPLE OF THE SOUTHWEST
Southwest Contemporary, Vol. 6 Rooted: Poetics of Place, Fall 2022
In The Yucca People, writer Tyler Stallings and photographer Naida Osline contemplate the desert and land use through the lens of the Yucca plant.
In this light, I see the Yucca People come alive. When the shadows shift from long to short as the sun rises, they are on the move, their shapes transforming into elders, alien beings, ghosts, shamans, kings, queens, warriors, victims, seekers, sentinels, and migrants of the Southwest. For 40 million years, they have silently populated these arid lands: sometimes germinating, other times cloning. Some clonal rings are nearly 2,000 years old. Deserts knitted through California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico are their domains.
—Tyler Stallings, excerpt from essay
REVOLVING
From
Los Angeles Review, Vol. 16, Fall 2014
A literary journal of divergent literature with a West Coast emphasis
Tyler Stallings explores inheriting a gun from his father, its karma, gun culture in the southeast, and the hidden meanings in a manual for the Smith & Wesson revolver.
I inherited a revolver from my father. I’ve never shot it. It has sat in its leather holster for decades. As his only child and son, it came into my possession when he died thirty-five years ago at age thirty-five. I was thirteen years old then, but my last contact with him was when I was ten, saying goodbye after his divorce from my mother. It took years to have a cop friend open it properly to see if it was loaded. It was not. Prior to this favor, I had horrible fantasies of an unforeseen bullet fired mistakenly, killing whoever was in its path. That never happened, but what has been fired into my life since inheriting the gun is its karma
—Tyler Stallings, excerpt from essay