Contemporary Landscapes: Moses Lake from a Bomb's Eye View Scott Bailey
I am only now emerging from the reverse culture shock of returning to Washington State after more than a decade away, including five-year stints living in both Japan and Egypt. With this exhibition, I re-introduce myself to the landscape of my youth. My travels both permit and force me to view this region in the context of the global community, and this work is an expression of that altered perspective as seen through the lens of contemporary technology.
At the turn of the last century, early aerial photography coincided with the revolutions of Modernist abstract painting, giving army generals detailed surveillance information about the landscape they hoped to conquer, and giving artists a new way of processing space and time. Images taken from above are naturally flat, devoid of the traditional cues of perspective and scale, so interpreting them required a leap of imagination for people still struggling to comprehend that man could fly.
Today, satellite imagery provides fascinating, delicate, and useful information about places near and far to anyone with Internet access. Portable and omnipresent, the technology is global by definition, yet meticulously local in practice. Once only for government officials, spy satellite data have recently been declassified and are now widely accessible. Beautiful, intimate, detailed facts about Moses Lake previously unknowable are now available at the click of a mouse.
Of course, this reconnaissance technology is not perfected. The full map is made up of a patchwork of smaller images of varying resolutions, taken at different times and under different conditions. I have exploited the computer's interpretations and judgments about these surfaces. The artifacts and abstract qualities exposed through the blurring, heightening and blending of digital information produce colors and patterns that once again reflect examples of a Modern and Postmodern painting vernacular.
I first felt the paradoxical power of these already painterly images watching satellite video footage of so-called "smart bombs" during the first Gulf War. The imagery drew me in only to be replaced by the twinge of terror at the blur, flash and blackness at the point of impact.
If these paintings, at once abstract and literal, are beautiful, I have aimed for a complex and poetic aesthetic—one where beneath the visceral painted surfaces lie uneasy questions about the processes through which they were created and the technology employed in their realizations.
What once perhaps only gods could see, anybody sees-from a painter intrigued by images at once superficially dazzling and tainted with anxiety, to your next door neighbor, to the multitude of global forces with a multitude of unspoken intentions. Exquisite information such as this, free as it may be, comes at a price.
Let the Target Be Art: Riffing on Bailey's Moses Lake Derek Sheffield
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. —Theodore Roethke
Through a glass eye in orbit, through strata of software and the painter's eye, we see splashes of Moses Lake — landscape transmuted by humanity's most sophisticated technology and humanity's highest pursuit. A region magnified by telescopic objectivity imbued with a mortal's touch.
Where photographic reality crosses a line into systemic and imaginative elicitation, the artist finds beauty. Where rivers flow jumbled with the rust-colored shards of all faiths, a swath of cerulean blue claims fervently earth and sky are of one direction. No schoolbook dichotomy resides in this town. Here, the soft encases the hard, the delineated embeds itself in the unfocused.
Whereas some artists spur their horses away from technology, shying from its seemingly sterile needles, fearing it thins the human touch, this artist sees through it. A human complexity permeates every step of his creative process, a process combining entropy and order, fact and deceit. But where are the citizens in all this humanity, the laborers and loafers, the naked babies and swaddled old, the sellers and sold, dirty rich, dirty poor? What were you dreaming when the satellite's cold, roving eye floated through? We are more than burnt sienna, finer than echoes of cadmium yellow.
How many times has this satellite scanned the top of your head? All of us, all of us here, raising a hand when our name is called — no one gets out unobserved.
How many times over decades have machines irrigated and harvested this field, wheel after radiating wheel? And this spot you can point to with your finger, an instant, a boy and girl lying on their backs, arms touching, looking up as dusk brushes itself through the air, feeling the sharp insinuations of crickets, everything rinsed with earth.
Even now, transparent lines of longitude and latitude intersect where you are, cross-hatching how exactly you feel living in this art that is our world, this town of serene targets. It could be we live here, encamped, roofed, girded, bordered, and gridded. Scrutinized and charted by circling observatories, we are stars, who, like the glittering ones, are capable of both massive destruction and patient creation.
This American journey sometimes feels borrowed, the next few hours, on loan. Tomorrow, at the end of its leash, blurs green and blue. Tail wagging, it looks back: What will you do?
Derek Sheffield lives between pine trees and log trucks in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains where he weeds, shovels snow, and writes. He received a 2004 Artist Trust GAP Grant. Blue Begonia Press published his chapbook of poems, A Mouthpiece of Thumbs (2000). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Open Spaces, Crab Creek Review, Passages North, and The North American Review.