Death Valley evokes not so much the mythos of the Cowboy itself, but temporal and geographical imaginary of cinema, as it has been articulated in the first enduringly archetypal, and purely cinematic genre, the Western.

The installation is organized around a set of binaries or tensions that propels cinema as a medium: between action and location, the celebration of ephemeral instant and the suspension of time. In the counterpoint of the large video projections that flank the main gallery space and the drawings themselves, the epic timelessness of landscape brushes up against the temporal instant of the film-frame, moments excised with surgical precision from the chaos of action. The quintessentially (fictive) empty space of the West -- the terra nullius that grounded imaginings of infinite expansion -- juxtaposed with the "West" that is the site of strenuous human action, the proving ground of heroic masculinity, the battle, melding, and mastery of man over beast/nature.

More unexpected is the show's revelation of the ways in which, refracted in / produced through the cinematic lens, the West becomes precisely that which it is not: the arid desert, revealed in slow aerial pan, resembles the sea floor -- primordial, untouched, uninhabitable, pre-social; the gestural topoi of the "cowboy" body -- supposed shorthand for brute corporeal force, pure efficiency -- suggest balletic grace and fluidity; the evocation of noise and tumult is nullified by the eerie, echoey silence of film, image, and the gallery space (like the  bottom of a swimming pool).

The installation, in close dialogue with the work itself, speaks also to cinema as a medium: an image coaxed momentarily out of the darkness, conjured through the projection of light, it is always already ghostly, haunted by its own immateriality. Just as the cinematic Western enables spectators an intimate, if fragile / fleeting relation with unimaginable vastness -- a source of their powerful nostalgic aura, the drawings lit by closely focused spots create a kind of sublime intimacy with the specter of our own cowboy culture, and ultimately, our own mortality. 

The Range drawing series is a central element of the Death Valley installation.