Revealing the Hidden Challenges and Complexities of the American West
**Exploring the “Out of Site” Exhibition: How Science Has Shaped and Scarred the American West**
LOS ANGELES — The Autry Museum of the American West has long been steeped in depictions of the romanticized Wild West, often bathed in muted earth tones of golden sunsets, windswept sagebrush, and rugged brown terrains. However, its latest exhibition, *Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West*, casts these familiar vistas in a more somber light. Presented as part of Getty’s *PST: Art + Science Collide* initiative, the exhibition delves into the scientific technologies used to map, exploit, and surveil the West’s resource-rich landscapes. Through a compelling collection of historical and contemporary works, the exhibition dismantles idyllic myths of the frontier to reveal a complex interplay of exploration, extraction, militarization, and environmental degradation.
### Surveillance and Surveying: The Invisible Beneath the Surface
Upon entering *Out of Site*, visitors are immediately confronted with a haunting projection. An infrared camera mounted on a sculpture resembling a drone captures live feeds of visitors, displaying their images against the entrance wall. This sets the tone for the exhibit’s exploration of the duality of “survey” and “surveillance.” Both words share the same French root, *sur*, meaning “over,” but the exhibition urgently shifts the focus toward what lies beneath: the land’s rich resources of natural gas, silver, and uranium, and the Indigenous communities who were displaced or exploited in the pursuit of these riches.
### Artistic Echoes of Plundered Landscapes
One of the historical works on display, Thomas Moran’s *Hot Springs of the Yellowstone* (1872), captures the West’s pristine geothermal pools in warm tones that evoke the promise of newfound wealth. However, this same natural gas-rich landscape, celebrated in Moran’s art, is also emblematic of why the land was forcibly taken from Indigenous peoples during westward expansion. The painting’s rainbow-tinted optimism contrasts sharply with Julie Shafer’s *Conquest of the Vertical: 300 Miles to Eureka! (no. 3)* (2013), a black-and-white silver gelatin pinhole negative of a mining site. The eerie tones of the photograph speak to the haunting legacy of resource extraction and displacement.
Notably, Shafer’s use of silver salts in her photographic process further underscores this link, as silver remains one of the many minerals extracted from the region.
### Military Testing and Its Lasting Scars
The West’s vast, open landscapes — often wrongly assumed to be “empty” — became convenient testing grounds for the U.S. military in the mid-20th century. Nuclear testing, concentrated in the Southwest during the 1950s and 1960s, scarred the land and exposed nearby communities to devastating radiation without full knowledge of the consequences. Such memories are brought to life in Yulia Pinkusevich’s *Nuclear Sun* series (2010), a collection of charcoal drawings depicting nuclear mushroom clouds. Rendered in fisheye distortion, the clouds take on the appearance of cancerous growths, highlighting the environmental and human toll of Cold War militarization.
Displayed adjacent to these drawings is Harold E. Edgerton’s *Mirror Sphere* (1954), a reflective ball used to capture 180-degree images of nuclear explosions. The juxtaposition of these two works underscores the chilling intersection of art, war technology, and human suffering.
### The West as a Laboratory for Surveillance Technology
While the U.S. government once used the West for nuclear weapons testing, modern military technologies have turned its skies into a laboratory for surveillance. Julie Anand and Damon Sauer’s *Calibration Mark AF49 with Satellites* (2015), part of their *Ground Truth* photography series, examines this history of observation. The work captures Cold War-era concrete calibration markers used to align surveillance satellites, overlaid with digital tracings of satellite paths. Such imagery parallels contemporary issues like drone surveillance, particularly at the U.S.-Mexico border, illustrating the evolution of tools that continuously monitor and control movement across the landscape.
### Indigenous Perspectives and Resistance
Highlighting the exhibition’s historical indictment of westward expansion and modern-day technologies, the inclusion of Indigenous voices adds a vital layer to the narrative. Artist Will Wilson (Diné/Navajo) explores themes of displacement and ecological harm in *Auto Immune Response/Survey 1* (2020), a stark archival pigment print. Wilson’s work interrogates how Indigenous lands, often mislabeled as barren or uninhabited, were turned into testing grounds for nuclear arms or sacrificed for resource extraction. This displacement is not just a historical trauma; it remains an ongoing struggle for Indigenous peoples fighting to preserve their lands and livelihoods.
### Reinterpreting Romanticized Landscapes
The exhibition’s audacious reappraisal of the American West’s history challenges the Hollywood-heavy, gold-tinted narratives that often dominate visual dep