Autry Museum, Los Angeles
Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West
May 18, 2024 – January 5, 2025
George Montgomery Gallery
About the Exhibit
The Western landscape is a place where the transformation of physical space involves both visualization and manipulation, where the connections between what can be physically seen and how it is visually represented are not always clear; technologies originally designed to render places visible often became instruments of invisibility and surveillance, severing western lands from the populations that depend on them. Out of Site focuses on three technological revolutions to examine how visual technologies, artistic interventions, and the workings of state power have evolved in tandem with the Western landscape: wet-plate photography, used to theorize geological processes; the rise of aerial photography and pattern recognition; and the increasing use of drones, satellites, and other long-range photographic technologies to image secretive sites, military installations, and other technologically-mediated locales. The exhibition features 90 artworks, archival materials, and devices ranging from mammoth plate cameras to drones. Carleton Watkins’ Nevada mining photographs,19th-century geological reports, and stereoviews, and Margaret Bourke-White’s aerial surveys published in LIFE magazine in 1936 are juxtaposed with contemporary photographic and video pieces by David Maisel, Michael Light, and Steven Yazzie, among other artists.
Exhibition Sponsors
Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West is among more than 60 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art
The exhibition is curated by Amy Scott, with co-curators Hillary Mushkin and William L. Fox.
My contribution are these 9 charcoal drawings titled Nuclear Suns. They are faithful charcoal portraits depicting the first millisecond of the first nuclear tests conducted in the US. The drawings were made in 2010 @goldwellmuseum where I was an artist in residence. My studio looked over the vast expanses of Death Valley and the “Trinity” test site. It was an eerie, potent place to work.
The source images were taken in 1945 with Harold “Doc” Edgertons rapatronic camera. I first discovered one of these photographs in Michael Lights book titled “100 Suns” which amassed 100 historic military images of early nuclear tests, A selection from 100 suns is also included in this exhibition.
Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West
May 18, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Autry Museum George Montgomery Gallery.