Contemporary Arts Across Political Divides: Difficult Conversations

Incendiary Traces included in Jenna Altomonte’s essay, Artistic Interventions Beyond the Borderzone, Chapter Seven, Contemporary Arts Across Political Divides: Difficult Conversations, edited by Alla Myzelev and Tijen Tunali, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2023.


PLEIN AIR

MOCA Tucson, May 14, 2022 - February 5, 2023 | traveled to Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, July 21 - December 10, 2023

Plein Air is a group exhibition that explores shifting ideas of western landscape, painting, and fieldwork. Plein Air includes work by Susanna Battin, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, iris yirei hu, KB Jones, Hillary Mushkin (Incendiary Traces), Sterling Wells, and Paula Wilson.


Hillary Mushkin: Survey to Surveillance (VIDEO)

Sci-Arc Channel | Voices from Places, Episode 1

In the first episode of Voices from Places, Hillary Mushkin shares insights from her Places Journal essay “Survey to Surveillance." She asks us to reconsider conceptions of the U.S.-Mexico border as a hard or definite line and instead to understand the border as a network diagram. Mushkin draws a connection between the 19th-century scientific impulse to classify a territory as a way of claiming and controlling it — exemplified by the creation of the U.S. Mexico Boundary Survey Commission Report (1857-1859) and also by contemporary modes of surveilling and compiling data on individuals. Specifically, Mushkin considers technologies used by the Department of Homeland Security to surveil migrant and immigrant communities. She reflects on the idea that the border is malleable, and, given the political will, that this system could be dismantled and reconstructed to reflect different and more humane priorities.


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Survey to Surveillance in Places Journal

April 2021 • Hillary Mushin

Mushkin’s essay “Survey to Surveillance” expands on the Incendiary Traces project of the same name. Mushkin sets out to illustrate how the U.S.-Mexico border is not a line on the ground, but a network diagram drawn through bodies and databases.


COLA 2020 Visual Artist Fellowship

Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery • Oct 6, 2019 - Jan 12, 2020
View the COLA 2020 Catalog created in partnership with Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery

Hillary Mushkin’s practice has continually explored the uneasy juxtapositions and shifting perspectives of contemporary landscapes: how we see and represent place in our technological moment. In her Incendiary Traces series, “an experimental art, research and media initiative,” she engages 21st century sites of conflict—borders, training camps, military outposts—primarily through drawing. In doing so she explores the visible and invisible realities at play in these contested sites. What does a border look like? How do simulations transform our understanding of reality? 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


No Trespassing: A Survey of Environmental Art

KCET Artbound | Season 9, Episode 6

Throughout its history, the natural beauty of California has inspired artists from around the world from 19th-century plein air painting of pastoral valleys and coasts to early 20th-century photography of the wilderness (embodied famously in the work of Ansel Adams) and the birth of the light and space movement in the 1960s. Today, as artists continue to engage with California’s environment, they echo and critique earlier art practices that represent nature in “The Golden State” in a particular way. Featuring Incendiary Traces creator Hillary Mushkin, Richard Misrach and Laura Aguilar.

More video highlights from KCET Artbound:

Drawing the Unknown US Border | November 2019

Report on San Clemente Island Draw-in | September 2012

Drawing the 29 Palms Marine Base | March 2013

PUBLICATIONS

Hillary Mushkin: Incendiary Traces

Published by Pomona College Museum of Art in conjunction with the 2017 exhibition "Project Series 51: Incendiary Traces," the catalogue is available through D.A.P. Artbook. Read an excerpt from the book, Suzy Newbury's essay "The Intimate Technology of Remote Vision."

PRESS

"Staying Close to the Land With Plein Air Painting”, AX Mina, Hyperallergic, September 18, 2023
”Plein Air Is a Sobering Reminder of Human Impact on the Environment”, Thao Votang, Hyperallergic, August 29, 2022
"Audio Slideshow: Artists Contemplate a Border They Never Knew Existed,” Carren Jao, Artbound, KCET, November 12, 2019
"Visions of California That Don’t Begin or End at the Border Wall,” Abe Ahn, Hyperallergic, October 25, 2019
"No Trespassing: A Survey of Environmental Art," Artbound: Season 9, KCET TV, Los Angeles, 10 April, 2018
"Eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht," Von Jochen Stöckmann, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 26 August, 2017
"Active Duty: A New Exhibition Embeds Artists in Military Landscapes," Mimi Ziegler, Landscape Architecture, April 2017
"Tracing the Incendiary with Hillary Mushkin," L.A. Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, 20 February, 2017
"Artists Unite for 'Draw-in' Events, Draw Attention to Sites of Conflict," Liz Ohenesian, Artbound, KCET, 31 January, 2017
"America Deserta," Artbound: Season 5, KCET TV, Los Angeles, 2014