API 21901820 Slaughter, TX 2012

Mishka Henner made this artwork titled API 21901820 Slaughter, TX. He’s captured a bird’s eye view, an eerie image of land divided. The flat earth seems to be rendered into regimented rows, punctuated by an off-kilter darkness. I wonder what Henner was thinking when he framed this image. He’s playing with photography as a record of a landscape transformed, not by nature, but by an unnatural intervention. The surface is mostly muted browns and grays, with subtle variations that reveal the textures and patterns of the earth. The paint is thinly applied, allowing the details of the landscape to emerge. That single pump in the corner. It’s stark. Like a graphic mark on the land, a hieroglyph from the future, or maybe the present. Henner asks us to consider how we might feel about this mark, and the marks we can’t see. Artists are always responding to each other, across time, inspiring new ways of seeing and thinking. This picture is a kind of embodied expression, allowing for multiple interpretations and meanings.