Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West: Autry Museum

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.