Mushkin has often collaborated with colleagues—scholars, artists, writers, theorists, technologists—in order to expand her reach as well as to multiply perspectives. In this process, drawing comes up against multiple methods of observation. The ensuant tensions between ways of seeing and knowing reveal that although observation and surveillance share goals of tracking and exploring a given site, we often see through the lens of what we already know – a perpetual partial blindness. 

Recent work, and no doubt contemporary politics, have turned Mushkin’s attention to the 100-mile border zone of the United States, a strip of land in which most of the population lives and in which border law prevails—border patrol maintains the right to stop anyone within this zone. Here, the border is less a boundary than an invisible legal veil overlaying the landscape of American liberty in popular imagination and representation. For this new work, Mushkin brings an archival lens into her examination of borders, juxtaposing earlier 19th century survey practices against this space of 21st century surveillance. Nineteenth century boundary commission reports become the source of a photographic documentary series in which Mushkin investigates the various logics of colonial explorations in the Americas: naturalist engravings of the botany of sites take part in the encyclopedic processes of the enlightenment through which observation equated knowledge; “Profiles” of boundaries refer to cross sectional views of the terrain in the landscape, hidden to the eye (yet also provide obvious metaphors for the present day profiling of border policing); maps from a later 1899 International Boundary Commission Atlas, reveal the determined conclusion of such explorations—a seemingly thorough record of a place. These photographic studies of the archive form the backdrop for another “draw in” at a border site (with field geologists from Caltech), which provide an historical counter to the surveillance that takes place in the border zone today. Scientific colleagues drawing at the site will see entirely different forms of information than their 19th century predecessors, based on geological knowledge as well as recording technologies (including drone footage) unknown at the time of earlier expeditions. The atlas similarly is a staid record of questionable authority against mappings made by contemporary drones searching for anomalies, where observation occurs in the intersection of data and surveillance. Mushkin’s project in turn includes ink drawings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tracking software interfaces. These loose renderings challenge the seeming precision of the digital source. Each system, 19th or 21st century, relies on overlaying invisible structures of power over a site, and it is this similarity that Mushkin’s work explores. Quiet poetic moments are as crucial to the work as theoretical insights. Drawings made in situ undermine established mappings through an insistence on seeing anew. As Mushkin’s work focuses on “political facets of representing landscape,” it reminds us as well that all representation is political and that landscape bears a particular weight of social value and valuing.

— Jane McFadden