DISESTABLISHMENT

In 2016 Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears were designated as National Monuments to protect the especially wild and scenic regions of Southern Utah, areas that were so remote that they were the last in the United States to be mapped. In order to allow private companies to extract the oil and coal deposits that exist in the area, in 2017, the Trump administration drastically reduced Escalante and cut it into three smaller sections. Bears Ears was shrunk to a fraction of its former size. The unprotected landscapes were opened for oil drilling and coal mining, high impact activities that will forever damage the virgin landscapes and archaeologically rich terrain of the region.

I traveled to the region in 2019 to photograph specifically those areas that had previously been protected and but were since opened to drilling and mining. For this series, I first printed the work at 40x50 inches and exhibited them to the public at the San Diego Museum of Art. In order to create a visceral understanding of the potential for damage that awaits these environments, after one month of exhibition, the prints were removed from the walls and placed in a public space outside the museum. Members of the public were then invited by me to physically damage the works. Participants were encouraged to hammer on, cut away, stomp on, tear and mark up the prints. After the works had been damaged, they were reconstructed and re-hung on the walls of the musem for continued exhibition.

The destruction was an integral part of the final artwork, with public responses filmed and included in the re-installation of the altered works. These actions confront resistant participants with the question of, “If we are hesitant to damage these prints, why are we okay with allowing the actual environment to be destroyed by commercial exploitation?”

In 2021, the Biden administration restored these national monuments to their original footprints. A future administration may choose to unprotect them yet again however. Regardless of the outcome of this dispute, this work serves as a reminder that many other landscapes across America - and the world - face imminent destruction.

John Raymond Mireles, November 2021