Centennial

When the American Western Frontier was declared ‘closed’ a century ago, the event was greeted with a certain unease among historians and political actors, stemming from a perception that the frontier served an important distraction from the political machinations of real power relations. Adrift in the ‘American Century’ that followed, the frontier has been replaced variously by global empire, mass media, consumerism, the cold war, the space race, the space age, and, more recently globalization and the digital frontier.

Centennial, a large woodblock print mural spanning three walls in the main gallery is a black and white print, derived from a jigsaw block of distressed, cut and reassembled plywood printed on heavy watercolor paper.  It acts as a vacant stage that once possessed the expansive hope of the American frontier and now has been reduced to an empty wall—a ‘post-landscape landscape’, at once evoking historiography, topography and cosmology.