Landscape Acquisition (2012-Present)
The ongoing project Landscape Acquisition (2012–Present) is a multidisciplinary exercise in the collision between familiar vocabularies of airborne surveillance and the Western history of beauty in art. Several approaches are necessary to address these contradictory subject matters including video footage shot via cameras mounted to scale model military drones, appropriated and rephotographed stills of actual surveillance missions, and newly constructed archive images used to reorient those histories, to name a few. These processes work to filter and distill the technological image into its essentially discernible condition as an abstract object, one that is loosely attached to its referent and purified of its responsibility to depict concrete realities. The subjects in all instances are simultaneously denied and confirmed through fully recognizable geographic ideals, which indicate an image-based will to exert power over place and time.
