Photographs by Austin Aubry
Unknown Prospect: Body, Pigment, Swatch (click here for exhibition catalog)
January 14 - February 25, 2022
Artist Reception: January 21, 6-9 pm
Unknown Prospect is a particular place on a map, but also a body of work surveying so-called “public lands” through Ochre pigments, design research, and printmaking. Unknown Prospect is an iterative atlas of mining sites and their geological memory as told through color. My print work and architectural training in documents/drawing have led to an interest in maps and atlases as products of information, communication, narrative, and world-making.
My design process begins in the field, in active participation with Ochres. I assemble raw materials, or ’Ochre bodies’, as design research practice in earth materiality and color. Ochre bodies are later processed in the studio to produce mineral pigments used in various products of design. Currently, I’m investigating Ochres in combination with letterpress printmaking. Prints are made on a Vandercook No. 3 press in my studio. I use various sources of information to generate photopolymer plates for printing — analog drawings, GIS maps, digital photography, USGS data/images, and images generated from analysis on a Scanning Electron Microscope. My work distills experience at landscape scale into products at body, print, and book scale.
This exhibit is assembled according to the ontology of my Ochre practice as organized by original Ochre bodies from various mining sites and their pigment and swatch extensions. These extensions are used in print and digital works exploring alternative past and future narratives. I wonder if these products can lead to design ethics and practices that prioritize the relation between human and more-than-human. As an alternative to conventional, colonial mapping practices in the United States, these works are emergent with observations from experience, facts derived and measured by technology, and multiplicities generated by Ochre on the page.
The sites I visit up and down the Colorado Plateau are stolen in settler-colonial terms as mines, prospects, claims, and sorted as “public land” — but these lands are Indigenous territories of Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, Timpanogos, Goshute, Dine, Ute Mountain Ute, Zuni, and Hopi.
Virtual Exhibition Walkthrough click here.
Exhibition Lecture | TUESDAY, FEB. 22 AT NOON (MST] recording click here.