Boundary Maintenance: Internal Improvement, conceived by artist and land-surveyor Jesse Vogler, is an architecturally based project that employs research and intervention at PLAND in Tres Piedras, New Mexico. During the 2012 and 2013 seasons, PLAND hosts Vogler in-residence, providing on-site access for him to perform open-ended research via land-surveying, performances, a series of architectural sculptures, and a collection of drawings and photographs, resulting in an innovative experimental report of the region's built environment. Boundary Maintenance speaks to the risks, limits, and assumptions of amateur architecture and examines regional paradoxes regarding official regulations and self-enforced boundaries (even the abandonment of such rules). Through Vogler's residency, PLAND promotes dialogue within Tres Piedras and broadly considers communities developed though non-traditional means.

Jesse Vogler is an artist and architect whose work sits at the intersection of spatial practices, material culture, and political economy. Drawn to questions that attach themselves to the periphery of architectural production, his work takes on themes of work, law, property, expertise, and perfectibility. Recent projects include a series of exhibitions on the administrative landscape with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, an experimental summer field-school on the cultural landscapes of the Americas, and a collaborative project with the Peterborough Fence Viewer as part of a MacDowell Colony residency. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, the CLUI, the Center for Contemporary Art Santa Fe, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts; his writing and work has appeared in [bracket], Thresholds, Domus, and Artforum among others. Vogler co-founded the Institute for Marking and Measuring and is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis.

Erin Elder is curator at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Her interests include temporary radical communities, countercultural architecture, land-use in the West, alternative education, and experimental art practices.  Her writing has been published by University of Minnesota Press, University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery, Proximity magazine, and more. She has produced projects with a variety of institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Württembergischer Kunstverein, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the MCA in Denver. She holds dual self-designed BAs from Prescott College and an MA in curatorial practice from California College of the Arts.

Nina Elder is an artist who examines land use in the American West, and its cycles of production, consumption, and waste. Her paintings and drawings respond to the aesthetic mitigation that camouflages humanity's industrial proliferation and dependence on natural sources. She aspires to elucidate and aestheticize the friction, grandeur, mystery, frankness, degeneration, necessity and beauty in the contemporary American landscape. Nina holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from the University of New Mexico. Her work is exhibited nationally, and has been included in publications including Art in America and New American Paintings.

Nancy Zastudil is an itinerant curator and writer who focuses on collective art practices that operate in the service of revolution and social progress. Additionally, organized under the title of the Necessarian, she emphasizes an expanded notion of curating to provide creative services for organizations and artists. She is cofounder of PLAND (Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation); coordinator of ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness Taos; and a visual arts writer for A+C Magazine, Houston. She holds a BFA in painting and drawing from Ohio State University and an MA in curatorial practice from California College of the Arts.

Founded in 2009 by Erin Elder, Nina Elder, and Nancy Zastudil, PLAND is a multidisciplinary organization that supports the development of experimental and research-based projects through a variety of on- and off-site programs. Headquartered off-the-grid in Tres Piedras, New Mexico, PLAND is a hands-on, exploratory approach to do-it-yourself, alternative living. PLAND finds its inspiration in a legacy of pioneers, entrepreneurs, homesteaders, artists, and other counterculturalists who, through both radical and mundane activities, reclaim and reframe a land-based notion of the American Dream.