erasure
erasure is a series of time-lapses created in the Trans Pecos region of West Texas, where land apears to be vast and seemingly endless, yet of which 95% is private and, for the most part, owned by just 1% of the population, primarily ranchers.
erasure iv, a 44:19 minute timelapse piece in West Texas, equates the process of camouflaging a bulk overhead feeder on a working ranch 30 miles south of Marfa, Texas with the erasure of the feeder as Western modern agrarian infrastructure and a symbol/remnant of settler colonialism. The laborious process of erasure iv is grounded in the desire to expose the lengths to which other concocted mythologies are fabricated, layer by layer. These American lands are associated with an intensely private, nonurban identity only accessible to a small percentage of the population. Well-defined fences and boundaries have become integral to one’s private American identity and even a major feature of the landscape. Looking specifically into the myth of the West as an Edenic paradise symbolizing pastoral simplicity and economic independence based on subsistence farming as well as a site of quests for land and dominance - I aim to examine the way in which these mythologies are still present in West Texas today, and how they have, in turn, erased prior land histories of West Texas.
