The dam and the desert play significant roles for Burns as emblems of mankind’s ongoing attempt to dominate an inhospitable and insubordinate habitat. The landscape, mythologized within American history through a lens of Manifest Destiny, is alien and bleak for human dwelling, and becomes a protagonist in and of itself. In before the wake (2015) a series of interventions made by Burns explore the site-specific research conducted for filming the first video of the project A Smeary Spot (NS0) (2015) . Each of the twelve prints comprising the work, six of which are presented in the exhibition, is built on an image torn out of a catalog of photographs taken by Tad Nichols documenting the Glen Canyon before it was dammed and turned into Lake Powell in the Utah Desert. Upon the surface of these images Burns has splashed and painted a mixture of spirulina and polyurethane to dam the images herself. These images, with their green stains of experimentation and uncanny terrain, recall science fiction imagery and freeze the canyons in impacted time. 7 In their 2011 publication Cruel Optimism , theorist Lauren Berlant argues that national identity is less linked to choices we make than to a set of compulsory attachments and identifications that are known through feeling. 8 The persistence of the American Dream, or the long extended state of its decom- position, is attributed, they suggest, to cruel optimism, which is a devotional conditioning under nationhood, a desiring something that is self-detrimental which has higher stakes in an interchange of fantasy and futility. 9 This they say, is something processed through experience before rationalized in thought. That history in the present is understood first through affect, Berlant says, is the body’s response to the world, something you’re always catching up to. This anxiety of perpetual deference is also the grasping for the unattainable, and a demand upon the now. In many ways, Berlant’s affective theory is the fraudulent promise of the American Dream and its proposal of the good life which, always just out of reach, is tricking even those supposedly included in the prospect into feeling the defunct and isolating promises of individualism 7 While driving through the desert on a cross country trip in 2015, Burns was struck by the vast open space of such a familiar/unfamiliar landscape. While filming there, the artist discovered Lake Powell, and understood its uncanny presence without fully comprehending why. Later learning about the various interventions within the desert, Burns discovered that the lake was constructed via a dam that was built in 1956. Burns also discovered that the site is held in public government lands, which means in theory, its ownership is shared by all Americans. Through invisible borders, these lands are meant to be accessible to the public, and managed by the government held in the trust for all those living in the United States. 8 Lauren Gail Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 2. 9 Ibid., 1. 10 José Esteban Muñoz, “Queerness as Horizon,” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Sexual Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 2009): 20–22.
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