MARGET
LONG
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
MARGET
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
The Country Turning Upside Down, 2015
The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Exhibit Hall 1, Wendover Complex
July 2015-March 2016
As a resident artist at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Long researched and photographed the geophysical and cultural phenomena of mirages. This exhibition marks the culmination of that fieldwork.
The large panoramic photograph documents the Hellfire Launch, an annual amateur rocketry event held on the salt flats. Shot from a great distance, the scene appears doubled within a mirage—an atmospheric echo that turns the event into a self-reflecting spectacle.
The image reveals the social choreography of an amateur gathering on this scale, a strange theater inscribed in the landscape—“these plays, this lusus naturae,” as Antonius de Ferrari once wrote of mirages. Yet the image also breaks down: the digital file loses fidelity at this size, just as a mirage dissolves under the gaze of one who approaches it.
On the reverse side of the panels, accompanying texts—drawn from sources as varied as Aristotle, The Three Stooges, and the artist Joan Jonas—extend the work’s oscillation between science, humor, and poetics.
See wall texts [PDF].