The first night after the sun burns out is part of a show-in-parts comprising a screening of Badlands (1973) at Holiday Forever in Jackson, WY and the exhibitions Naming the animals, numbering the beasts at Yeah Maybe, Minneapolis, MN; All that is solid melts into light at Chamber, Milwaukee, WI; and The first night after the sun burns out at the Neon Heater, Findlay, OH. Driving from Vancouver, BC to Detroit, MI over the course of this project traces an inversion of the westward path of colonialism, reflecting on the means by which “the west was won.” Forces of capital have exacted high costs from disparate peoples and climates— siphoning resources from a finite future to feed a precarious now—in order to erect various myths and tautologies. We are all performing resilience to questionable degrees of adequacy. The pragmatics of short-term survival increasingly occupy mental states in preclusion of alternative futures. It feels important, therefore, to assert affects and dreams as means of reclaiming the unconscious: that crucial link in the feedback cycle of subjectivity and mass reality.

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With many thanks to Ian Breidenbach, Maddie Butler, Jessica Evans, Lauren Flynn, Paige Früchtnicht, Virginia Griswold, Andy Kincaid, Dylan Reford, Kyle Seis, and Lindsay Sorell.