Unsteady Ground is a show of moving image work that explores the precarious nature of home as a physical and psychic environment.  This show initially grew out of consideration for Galveston's own proximity to instability, with seasonal weather and economic depressions.   However, current global threats to the recognition of home, including oppressive regimes, border fortifications, environmental disasters, gentrification, settler colonialism, and surveillance states ultimately connects the work in this show. Through magical realism, science fiction, lyrical essays, digital abstraction, virtual reality, and choreographic interpretations, the artists in the show excavate the idea of home, community and unsteady ground.  The works in this show interrogate what it means to witness a disaster, acknowledge grief, confront denial, registering historical paralysis, explore forgotten histories, aspire to hope, and demand visions of resistance. 

Mounia Akl

Christina Battle

The people in this picture are standing on all that remained of a handsome residenceis a 4-channel projected installation comprised of archival photos from Edmonton's deadly 1987 Tornado that are glitched and datamoshed into repetitive abstraction. When Battle came across the source images she manipulated in this work, it triggered her personal memories from the days surrounding the event and what they actually looked like. She thought about our increasing desire to capture and disseminate images of disaster; about Disaster Porn - now a common phenomenon thanks to 24 hour repetitive news broadcasts and Instagram; about why we need to see images documenting disaster at all and why it is that we want those images to look beautiful.

Maha Maamoun

Based on a scene from the recent Egyptian novel  The 2053 Revolution  by Mahmoud Uthman, and referencing a related scene from Chris Marker's iconic 1962 film  La Jetee,  this work presents a future vision of the Pyramids Plateau, and by extension of Egypt, in the year 2026. A Future staged against the background of the Past and in the hackneyed vocabulary of the Present.

Lydia Moyer

Made over the course of eight years,  Paradise is a long-form video poem that examines loss as it is written - or in many cases unwritten - on the land. Weaving between the the speculative, the documented, and the personal, its ultimate focus is ownership and community in America and the tolls those ideas have taken on the places we have made, imagined, and let go .

Note: Viewing times for  Paradise  are on the hour during the GAR gallery's regular hours - Tuesday to Saturday, 11am - 4pm.

Adam SekulerInterpretive Site: Hanford Reach

Interpretive Site: Hanford Reach is part of a series of films in which Sekuler explores the troubled history of place through a choreographic and cinematic exercise. It's an intervention into a landscape with the intention of making a poetic discovery. 

Hanford Reach is a wild life preserve in Central Washington; however, no one set out to preserve the Reach. It stayed undeveloped for nearly six decades because it served as part of the wide, C-shaped buffer around the top-secret Hanford nuclear reservation, which produced the plutonium used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in World War II.  With Hanford's plutonium-production reactors now mothballed (and a massive cleanup under way), the Reach is a destination in its own right.  As part of the 195,000 acres of Hanford Reach National Monument, established in 2000, the Reach is a place to see what Eastern Washington looked like before irrigation, development, and dams. 

Adam Shecter