LOS ANGELES — The Autry Museum of the American West is usually 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, nevertheless, 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 was forces of destruction. The terrain that turned actor Gene Autry’s jubilant Hollywood playground bears the scars of genocide, extraction, and ecological harm from navy testing.
The exhibition instantly places guests in an uncomfortable place by projecting their picture, captured through an infrared digicam mounted to a perforated metallic sculpture of a drone, proper onto the doorway wall. This establishes the present’s via line, a linkage of the phrases “survey” and “surveillance,” which share the identical French root phrase, “sur,” that means over. But Out of Web site is extra involved with what’s beneath — pure gasoline within the floor, uranium hidden in mountains, and the folks under these faceless navy drones buzzing via 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 assets that made the West ripe for plunder. Thomas Moran’s gold-framed “Hot Springs of the Yellowstone” (1872) is a heat subject 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 stunning to color can be why the land was forcibly wrested from Indigenous folks, then plundered to generate vitality in an industrializing nation. As a pointy distinction to Moran’s portray, Julie Shafer’s silver gelatin pinhole destructive, “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 destructive transforms the objects into ghostly kinds, making the small pool of water seem eerie and unsettling. Shafer’s choice to make use of a creating course of that includes silver salts is notable, as they have 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 probably the most well-known instance of that is nuclear testing, which was most lively between the Fifties and ’60s. Most nuclear weapon research within the Southwest came about after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The navy didn’t know the complete 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 Collection (2010), charcoal on paper; proper: Harold E. Edgerton, “Mirror sphere” (1954), glass/plastic with metallic coating
Vital 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 images sequence, 4 trapezoidal concrete tiles type a type of starburst sample. They appear to be land artwork, however are the truth is calibration markers for surveillance satellites that have been lively within the Chilly Battle. The artists added crisscrossing white traces to the sky, which hint the routes of the satellites. In trendy instances, it’s drones that fly overhead, principally monitoring folks crossing borders in order that regulation enforcement can apprehend them.
Out of Web site is a surprisingly bleak exhibition for an artwork establishment that normally dwells on associations between the West and common leisure, but it surely’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 Drive 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 Means, Griffith Park, Los Angeles) via January 5, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Amy Scott.