Black Place #1

As scholar and curator Jami Powell notes, “During a 2017 residency at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Michael Namingha found himself drawn to the distinct, rounded, gray-and-black terrain of the Bistahí Dééł Náázíní (Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness), which O’Keeffe called the “Black Place.” The area sits beneath the largest methane cloud in the United States, which when viewed with infrared technology appears as a bright orange, red, and yellow dot over the Four Corners region. After using a drone to capture the image of the fragile landscape, Namingha arranged the red from this satellite imagery alongside the fragmented and abstracted landscape. The result is a hauntingly beautiful interrogation of human intervention on the landscape.”