(Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears | Photo Courtesy of At Liberty Arts Collaborative)
At Liberty Arts Collaborative is hosting video exhibit Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears by Rick Silva from January 10 to February 29, with an opening celebration on Friday, January 10 at 5:30pm. An Artist Talk will take place Saturday, February 29 at 11am.
Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears is an experimental video that reflects the political and ecological threats that face four U.S. National Monuments. The work combines aerial drone footage and photogrammetry with 3D animation to create a nature documentary that collapses into itself. The wilderness is scanned by large shapes that momentarily reduce the landscape into grayscale polygons — in these redactions we glimpse a near-future dystopia of computer-vision aided resource extraction.
Rick Silva was born in 1977 in Brazil and lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he is an Associate Professor of Art & Technology at the University of Oregon. His works and installations have been acquired by multiple permanent collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Borusan Contemporary Collection and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. WIRED magazine called Silva’s videos “glitchy, curious things; some mesmerizing, some arresting.”