We Considered Ourselves to be a Powerful Culture...

Keeva Lough (she/her)
"We Considered Ourselves to be a Powerful Culture (Three Proposals for a Violent Monument: 1. Is This a Place of Honor? 2. Is Any Highly Esteemed Deed Commemorated Here? 3. Is Anything Valued Here?)"
2023
Three cork bulletin boards, nine fiber baryta photograms, sketch paper, video projection, metallic inkjet print
Courtesy of the artist

Artist statement:

We leave marks upon the earth as monuments, reminders, and warnings that we existed. Jean Tinguley's "Study for an End of the World No. 2", which parodied the Mojave Desert nuclear weapons tests of the 1950s, inspired me to read the Department of Energy's 1993 study "Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant", in which two groups of experts propose imposing monuments that might deter humans from disturbing still deadly nuclear waste in the far future. This led me to read further research on geologic studies conducted in the Mojave in the years after the tests. Traveling to the Jean Dry Lake Bed where "Study for an End of the World No. 2" took place, I used analog photography and digital video to recreate documentation photographs of Tinguley’s Happening. I then made marks upon the resulting images using three methods. Each of the three bulletin boards shows a result of one of my “proposals”: nine darkroom photograms which depict an explosion of research, a video which overlays text adapted from the DOE’s proposals onto images of a quaking lake bed, and a digital scan of a section of 35mm film whose blotch of over-exposure obliterates the landscape and evokes the effect of radiation on film.

www.keevalough.com