LOS ANGELES — The Autry Museum of the American West is commonly tinted in washed out hues of gold, brown, and sage, portray a romantic picture of the Wild West. Out of Web site: Survey Science and the Hidden West, nonetheless, trades these colours for silver and black, conjuring a darkish environment that illustrates the sinister undertones of the artwork.
This exhibition, a part of Getty PST: Artwork + Science Collide, focuses on the scientific instruments which have been used to map the West’s resource-rich panorama, and grapples with how these applied sciences have been changed into forces of destruction. The terrain that grew to become actor Gene Autry’s jubilant Hollywood playground bears the scars of genocide, extraction, and ecological injury from navy testing.
The exhibition instantly places guests in an uncomfortable place by projecting their picture, captured by way of an infrared digicam mounted to a perforated metallic sculpture of a drone, proper onto the doorway wall. This establishes the present’s by means of line, a linkage of the phrases “survey” and “surveillance,” which share the identical French root phrase, “sur,” which means over. But Out of Web site is extra involved with what’s below — pure gasoline within the floor, uranium hidden in mountains, and the folks under these faceless navy drones buzzing by means of the skies.
Trevor Paglen, “Karnak, Montezuma Range Hoar; Hough Transform; Hough Circles; Watershed” (2018), gelatin silver LE prints
Many historic works by the way depict the sources that made the West ripe for plunder. Thomas Moran’s gold-framed “Hot Springs of the Yellowstone” (1872) is a heat discipline examine of the panorama’s geothermal swimming pools. Within the portray’s background, a rainbow emerges from a cloudy sky, heralding the promise and potential of the newfound territory. However the pure gasoline that made these swimming pools so lovely to color can also be why the land was forcibly wrested from Indigenous folks, then plundered to generate power in an industrializing nation. As a pointy distinction to Moran’s portray, Julie Shafer’s silver gelatin pinhole adverse, “Conquest of the Vertical: 300 Miles to Eureka! (no. 3)” (2013), is a black and white picture of a mining website. The colour inversion of the adverse transforms the objects into ghostly kinds, making the small pool of water seem eerie and unsettling. Shafer’s determination to make use of a creating course of that comes with silver salts is notable, as they had been among the many components extracted from the West.
Along with mining, the US authorities’s false impression that the West was empty of human life made it a navy testing floor. Maybe essentially the most well-known instance of that is nuclear testing, which was most lively between the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s. Most nuclear weapon research within the Southwest occurred after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The navy didn’t know the total well being impacts of those weapons, but nonetheless dropped them on Native lands for many years.
Set up view of Out of Web site: Survey Science and the Hidden West on the Autry Museum of the American West. Left: Yulia Pinkusevich, Nuclear Solar Sequence (2010), charcoal on paper; proper: Harold E. Edgerton, “Mirror sphere” (1954), glass/plastic with metallic coating
Important documentation of the bombs dropped in Nevada and New Mexico exists, and Yulia Pinkusevich rendered these explosions in otherworldly charcoal drawings in her Nuclear Solar sequence (2010). 9 drawings depict the mushroom clouds from an uncommon, fisheye perspective, making them appear as if tumors caught in an ultrasound. Pinkusevich’s drawings refer to photographs captured by Harold E. Edgerton’s “Mirror Sphere” (1954), a silvery ball that made it simpler to {photograph} the explosions from a 180 diploma view; it’s on show subsequent to the drawings.
The navy additionally used the West as a spot to check surveillance know-how. In “Calibration Mark AF49 with Satellites” (2015), from Julie Anand and Damon Sauer’s Floor Fact pictures sequence, 4 trapezoidal concrete tiles kind a type of starburst sample. They seem like land artwork, however are in actual fact calibration markers for surveillance satellites that had been lively within the Chilly Struggle. The artists added crisscrossing white strains to the sky, which hint the routes of the satellites. In fashionable instances, it’s drones that fly overhead, largely monitoring folks crossing borders in order that legislation enforcement can apprehend them.
Out of Web site is a surprisingly bleak exhibition for an artwork establishment that often dwells on associations between the West and in style leisure, nevertheless it’s necessary that the Autry Museum confronts the darker histories lurking beneath the buttes, arches, and canyons of the stolen frontier.
John Divola, “Blue with Exceptions 16576 (12_16_2020),” from the sequence George Air Pressure Base (2020), pigment print, medium-format digital picture
Rachelle Reichert, “Moodswings,” from the sequence Silver Peak (2021), archival pigment prints on aluminum
Will Wilson (Diné/Navajo), “Auto Imune Response/Survey 1” (2020), archival pigment print
Julie Anand and Damon Sauer, “Calibration Mark AF59 with Satellites,” from the sequence Floor Fact (2015), archival inkjet print
Thomas Moran, “Hot Springs of the Yellowstone” (1872), oil on canvas
Out of Web site: Survey Science and the Hidden West continues on the Autry Museum of the American West (4700 Western Heritage Manner, Griffith Park, Los Angeles) by means of January 5, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Amy Scott.
