Rick Silva

Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears

Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears features four major national monuments in Oregon, California, Nevada, and Utah. Silva created the work in response to a presidential executive order signed in 2017, which enabled these once-protected lands (home to Indigenous sites) to be reduced in size to make space for drilling and mining. Silva’s imagery of sublime forests and rugged red rock challenges nationalistic ideals of the "American West" through digital manipulation. Portions of the landscape glitch with overlayed shapes that abstract the natural world into what Silva calls a “near-future dystopia of computer-vision aided resource extraction.” These digital renderings confront how the government values industry and capital over conserving the environment and safeguarding ancestral land.