Michael Ashkin, were it not for, 2019

Michael Ashkin works across a range of media – painting, photography, sculpture, video, and text. Uniting these diverse practices is a conceptual focus on the way that notions of space and place, landscape and self, are shaped by wider political and economic forces. were it not for is combining a 670-line text with 218 photographs of the Mojave Desert. This combination creates a a powerful sense of unease throughout the document, which is exploring the idea of fear and haunting as an effect of the violent legacies contained within the landscape, and as a function of the technologies that we use to represent it.