DAN HOLDSWORTH – TRANSMISSION
2012-03-19In Transmission: New Remote Earth Views, Holdsworth appropriates topographical data to document the ideologically and politically loaded spaces of the American West in an entirely new way. In his images of the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Mount St. Helens and Salt Lake City (Park City), we see stark, uninterrupted terrains where meaning is made through what it is absent, as much as what is seen. What at first appears to be a pure white snow-capped mountain is in fact a digitally rendered laser scan of the earth interpreted from United States Geological Survey data, a ‘terrain model’ used to measure climate and land change – to measure man’s effect on the earth.
Belying his empirical methodology is the fact that each of these terrains has a rich and conflicting cultural legacy. Beginning with the idealised aesthetic of the Romantic sublime via the deadpan industrial frames of the New Topographics photographers a century later, each has been subject to the gaze of artistic, political, and sociological categories claiming this territory as their own. Extending ideas of the frontier and seeing anew, Transmission captures the world as if from space, functioning not only as a map of the land but as a mapping of the discourses that these lands have come to represent.
Opposite – Mount Shasta D-2, 2012
Exhibition runs through to May 19th, 2012
Brancolini Grimaldi
43 – 44 Albemarle Street
London
W1S 4JJ
