Earth Works

EARTH WORKS

EARTH WORKS

For the past decade, Mishka Henner’s art has engaged with the nature of photography in the post-Internet age, employing imagery and material available in the public domain to redefine how photography can help us see the world. This catalogue presents examples from bodies of work made by the artist that employ satellite imagery as their primary source material, accompanied by the artist’s statements and critics’ quotes about each work.

Henner’s appropriation of online material engages with art history, digital culture, and market economics, resulting in critical and often controversial investigations of technological capitalism and its effect on our physical and social environment. In many ways, Henner’s use of remote network technologies anticipated the socially-distant conditions of our present post-Covid-19 world. His most controversial works have attracted international media coverage and vociferous push-back by traditionalists in the photographic community opposed to his methods.

Using tools available to anyone with an Internet connection, his works aim to extend the scope of the documentary genre to present new visions of State censorship (Dutch Landscapes, 2011), industrial food and energy processes (Feedlots and Fields, 2012-2013), US military infrastructure (Fifty-One US Military Outposts, 2010), and climate change (Landfall, 2018). Recently, Henner has produced photo-realistic works using Generative Adversarial Networks, a form of AI machine-learning that creates infinite varieties of imagery from pairs of photographs (The Fertile Image, 2020).

The effect of all these methods is the creation of a ‘super vision’ in which complex astronomical, industrial, technological, and weather systems are condensed into legible visual entities.

Evaporation Ponds

2018

Henner’s complex work demands an activated and invested viewer, one prepared to follow its investigations into the precarious, violent, fetishistic, mythological geographies and economies that continue to produce, exploit and circulate ‘precious commodities’, be they oil, beef or photography. These are exactly the places that need to be looked at more closely until something new emerges.

— Sarah James, Frieze

EVAPORATION PONDS

Evaporation Ponds are an interface between industry and the heavens.

These golden and fluorescent ponds are the residual by-products of natural gas power plants and return processed waste water to the sky. Their radiant washes of colour and texture belie their toxic nature.

Mesquite Evaporation Pond #1 (Apr 2013 capture) Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in floating frame, 169x62cm

Mesquite Evaporation Pond #1 (Apr 2018 capture) Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in floating frame, 169x62cm

Mesquite Evaporation Pond #2 (Apr 2013 capture) Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in floating frame, 134x54cm

Mesquite Evaporation Pond #2 (Nov 2018) Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in floating frame, 134x54cm

Solar

2018

Antelope Valley, Galleria Bianconi, Milan

Henner’s work is at the crossroads of many different genres or practices [...] part of a strategy of neo-appropriation that you find in contemporary photography today with the Internet.

— Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography, MoMA

SOLAR

Produced in parallel with Turbines, this series of large-scale works depicts gigantic solar farms across the USA. Solar was produced after returning to the American landscape in 2018 following a five-year hiatus of working with satellite imagery. I was curious if the ideological shifts that marked the ‘End of Oil’ narrative had any visible consequences on the landscape.

Sure enough, thousands of wind turbines and massive solar projects had appeared across Western and Midwestern States, and like the oil fields and feedlots that preceded them, the satellites had captured these renewable energy projects in great detail.

As traditional landscape photographs go, the dazzling patterns and configurations of these solar fields are unlike anything I’d seen before.

Their geometric layout reflected instead a new technological aesthetic that had been inscribed on the Earth’s surface. This aesthetic shift no longer evoked the Abstract Expressionist-style of Feedlots and Fields but instead, seemed to echo the Minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, and Frank Stella.

East Pecos Solar, Pecos County, Texas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in floating frame, 150x170cm

Antelope Valley Solar Ranch 1, Mojave Desert, Southern California Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in floating frame, 140x195cm

Garland Solar Power, Rosamond, California Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in floating frame 115x139cm

Landfall

2018

Landfall, Galleria Bianconi, Milan

[Henner] uniquely addresses the uncomfortable collision of public and private space and experience that now characterises much of our collective lived experience, and wades, too, into the grim realities of the commerce and commodity of physical bodies in the 21st century.

— Kate Albers, Circulation Exchange

LANDFALL

Landfall presents fifteen 12” picture discs depicting satellite images of retired hurricanes with audio recordings of eyewitnesses, storm chasers, forecasters, and the hurricanes themselves. The effect of the spinning records is to collapse the distance between the lofty, weightless gaze of the satellite and the tense, endangered predicament of eyewitnesses on the ground.

Each year, the World Meteorological Organization sets the names of upcoming hurricanes in advance. For Atlantic hurricanes, a list of male and female names are used on a six-year rotation. When a storm is so deadly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate, the name is retired, never to be used again.

The record number of North Atlantic hurricanes in recent years has been attributed to man-made climate change. Yet the hurricane represents a critical node in the relationship between Heaven and Earth, between man and God. The English word ‘hurricane’ comes from the Taino word ‘huricán’, the Carib Indian god of evil. Its devastating, uncontrollable force leaves us both mesmerized and terrorized.

“The wind is blowing up against us. I have a headboard, a large headboard to the bed actually up against the door and I have a washer and a dryer jamming it up against the doorway to stop it from the winds and debris blowing into the house, that’s probably what you can hear.”

Fabian 2003 Twelve inch vinyl picture disc

“Whoa! We just had a wind gust here, I would say over a Hurricane Four. It almost blew me over down the road here! Power is still on, I can see a porch light there, but if you look at the stop sign you can see how it’s getting blown all over the place!”

Dennis 2005 Twelve inch vinyl picture disc

“Heavy rains have triggered landslides, trapping some beneath the mud. A child was killed when a tree fell on a car parked outside a school in the capital Panama City. The US National Hurricane Center says Hurricane Otto is now blowing at about 120 km/h as it approaches Costa Rica and Nicaragua.”

Otto 2016 Twelve inch vinyl picture disc

“Forget that, come on! Tide’s getting harder. Hey! You don’t think you could swim over there? You think you can swim over there? Hey! Swim to the boat. It’s so high that it’ll come back this way.”

Katrina 2005 Twelve inch vinyl picture disc

Turbines

2017–18

Camp Grove Wind, Galleria Bianconi, Milan

Henner takes these satellite images and transforms them by altering and artistically enhancing the colours, lending them an unexpected, lyrical beauty; without ever altering the specific physical details of images. He explains that projects such as these exploit ‘loopholes in the vast archives of data, connecting the dots to reveal things that surround us but which we rarely see.’

It is a role reversal, citizens rather than governments doing it, that exposes the ease with which any sort of information can be obtained.

— Peter Yeung, The Huffington Post

TURBINES

I’ve always been fascinated how power and the energy industry manifest themselves in the landscape. Wind turbines are strikingly beautiful feats of engineering and what they do is beautiful too: harnessing a constant and invisible earthly resource.

Since producing works on the American landscapes in the early 2010s, thousands of wind farms had sprouted across America that weren’t there before. These turbines are a very human response to climate change and a clear reflection of our civilization’s attempts to find better, more sustainable ways of producing energy.

The series is abstract with landscapes full of texture and colour but I like to think there’s a rhythm to these images too. I decided each would have just one turbine in the centre of the frame which would hang adjacent to nearby turbines in the same arrangement as in the physical landscape.

How they’re arranged on the wall is therefore a reflection of how the winds blow.

In my thirties, I had a revelation that the screen was just another canvas and everything that appeared on it could be material with which to make art. With everything being photographed and filmed 24/7, and with tools like Google Earth and Street View at our disposal, we can think of the world is an image of infinite detail.

— From an interview with Port Magazine

Perrin Ranch, Coconino County, Arizona Archival pigment prints on Dibond, white aluminium frames Each 31.6x40.6cm

Ocotillo Wind, Imperial County, California Archival pigment prints on Dibond, white aluminium frames Each 31.6x40.6cm

Meadow Creek, Bonneville, Idaho Archival pigment prints on Dibond, white aluminium frames Each 31.6x40.6cm

Fields

2012–13

Levelland Oil Field #1, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

We hover over the image, inverting the surveillancelike gaze – the watched become observers. [Henner’s] project shifts the public documentarism articulated

by Robert Frank and Dorothea Lange towards the unseen spaces of private finance and security [...]

The ability to navigate and edit data provides new conditions of political accountability in an era of information as capital.

— George Vasey, The Photographers’ Gallery

FIELDS

The Nazca had their lines and the Americans have their oil fields. The former drew animal figures on the ground and the latter carved an industrial logic into the earth.

These oil fields reflect a circuitry pumping through the heart of American culture. The tentacles of the oil and gas industry span the vast territory of the American landscape like the veins and arteries of a body.

The oil flows like blood. This is a system for living and dying and it’s difficult to imagine the country and the values it exports without it.

The landscape of America is a patchwork of industry, agriculture, and desert. Between the deserts is a vast man-made circuit board of infinite detail and complexity. Only in the silence and vacuum of space - seven hundred miles above all the noise - does the network of America truly reveal itself.

A constellation of ex-military and civilian imaging satellites that captures every square inch of our world’s surface is now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. This constellation allows us to see the vast network in its material form.

Is there a deeper truth to be gleaned from the millions of interconnected pump jacks that are spread across the US? Are there parallels between the mobile devices that connect us and the transmission lines of industry? Do we, like them, exist as nodes in someone else’s network?

I needed a year to learn to read these landscapes and to understand the difference between the shadow of a pipeline and that of a telegraph pole; To recognize a transmission line from a dirt track or an operational pump-jack from a disused one. It wasn’t a purely visual landscape but one of data stacked in layers as thick and as deep as the rock being mined.

Kern River Oil Field, Kern County, California Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 150x85cm / 150x258cm / 258x450cm

Kern River Oil Field, Kern County, California (Detail)

Natural Butte Oil Field, Uintah County, Utah Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 150x85cm / 150x258cm / 258x450cm

Natural Butte Oil Field, Uintah County, Utah (Detail)

Levelland Oil Field #1, Hockley County, Texas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 150x85cm / 150x258cm / 258x450cm

Levelland Oil Field #1, Hockley County, Texas (Detail)

Levelland Oil Field #2, Hockley County, Texas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 150x85cm / 150x258cm / 258x450cm

Cedar Point Oil Field, Harris County, Texas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 150x85cm / 150x258cm / 258x450cm

San Andres Oil Field, Hockley County, Texas Archival pigment mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 150x85cm / 150x258cm / 258x450cm

Wasson Oil and Gas Field, Yoakum County, Texas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 150x85cm / 150x258cm / 258x450cm

Levelland Oil Field, Hockley County, Texas Archival pigment prints, 270x400cm

Field (North Ward Estes), Ward County, Texas Archival pigment print in tray frame platform, 150x1300cm

Feedlots

2012–13

Randall County Feedyard, Tulia, Texas. Artforum, April 2015

In an era of “ag-gag” laws, in which industrial-scale meat producers have persuaded several compliant state legislatures to make the act of documenting animal facilities with defamatory intent a crime, Earth’s man made constellation of satellites may yet provide the only documentation of the landscapes that agri-business would rather keep hidden.

Redefining the act of photography is not just a philosophical conceit in this instance; it is a necessary progression to continue the photographer’s work of helping us see the world.

— Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker

FEEDLOTS

I first came across these feedlots on Google Earth and had no idea what I was seeing. The mass and density of the black and white dots seemed almost microbial. To understand what they were I had to learn about the meat industry and its methods for maximizing yield in the minimum amount of time for the highest profit.

It used to take five years for a cow to reach its mature weight, ready for slaughter and processing. Today, since the structures and processes of feed yards have been perfected, that has been reduced to less than 18 months.

Such speed requires growth hormones and antibiotics in cows’ diets, and efficient feedlot architecture. Farmers can turn to reports to help calculate the maximum number of cattle that can fit in each pen, the minimum size of run-off channels that carry away thousands of tons of urine and manure, and the composition of chemicals needed to break down the waste as it collects in lagoons and drains into the soil. Different chemical mixes explain the varying toxic hues of each lagoon.

These pictures were made by stitching together hundreds of highresolution screen shots from publicly accessible satellite imaging software.

The results are prints of great clarity and detail that capture the effects of feedlots on the land.

The meat industry is a subject loaded with a moral and ethical charge. But when I think of these pictures, I don’t just see gigantic farms, I see an attitude toward life and death that exists throughout contemporary culture. These images reflect a blueprint and a horror that lie at the heart of the way we live.

— Statement written for the Los Angeles Times’ Op-Ed

Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 40x48cm / 102x122cm / 150x180cm

Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas (Detail)

Previous page: Tascosa Feedyard, Bushland, Texas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 102x129cm / 150x190cm

Tascosa Feedyard, Bushland, Texas (Detail)

Wrangler Feedyard, Tulia, Texas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 102x126cm / 150x186cm

Black Diamond Feeders, Herington, Kansas Archival pigment print mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 102x135cm / 150x199cm

Centerfire Feedyard, Ulysses, Kansas Archival pigment mounted to Dibond in aluminium tray frame 102x128cm / 150x189cm

Eighteen Pumpjacks

2012

Eighteen Pumpjacks, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

Henner’s work with the Google platform takes a decidedly top-down perspective that moves out of the urban context. For Henner, these tools enable us to ‘join the dots in the sea of data and imagery that exists online’ and by doing so, ‘begin to see and understand how the world looks from that point of view’. Henner’s approach is to find structural, geographical, economic or social patterns and produce typologies of what he finds, using the God’s eye perspective afforded by Google Maps.

— Gary Bratchford & Dennis Zuev, Visual Studies Journal

EIGHTEEN PUMPJACKS

Today, with the world’s economies so heavily reliant on oil, the public and industrial appetite for this most precious of commodities is insatiable.

Nowhere in the world has this ravenous hunger left its mark in such a pronounced and graphic manner as in the United States. Oil fields, comprising of thousands of pumpjacks, storage tanks, and pipelines, spread themselves across the landscape regardless of any natural or manmade obstacles that might stand in their way. The logic of oil exploration, exploitation and distribution lays its own map over the natural terrain.

Seen from above, the American landscape resembles a canvas shaped by industry in a manner reminiscent of the dynamic intensity of Abstract Expressionist painters such as Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann. It makes you wonder if the abstract expressionists’ inner landscapes were a response to the outer ones etched on the land, or if industrialists themselves consider the land to be a blank canvas on which to express themselves.

As we zoom-in and see these individual pumpjacks in isolation, they have an almost human quality that makes me think of the productive requirements demanded of each one of us by society. In their remote 24hour labour, are these the machines society wants us to emulate? Finally, the title and presentation of this series tips its hat to the work of Barnett Newman and his 18 Cantos portfolio. In Newman’s lithographs, fields of colour are bisected by lines dividing single fields into separate units.

Like Newman’s Cantos, each pumpjack occupies a unique field differing in form, colour and mood. And with a unique API code ascribed to all pumpjacks in the United States by the American Petroleum Institute, each one even has its own name.

— As told to TIME Magazine

Levelland, TX, API 21902673 Archival pigment print, 40x33cm

Slaughter, TX, API 21932470 Archival pigment print, 40x33cm

Edison, CA, API 02906563 Archival pigment print, 40x33cm

San Andres, TX, API 21930915 Archival pigment print, 40x33cm

San Andres, TX, API 21931252 Archival pigment print, 40x33cm

Mountain View, CA, API 02914653 Archival pigment print, 40x33cm

Dutch Landscapes

2011

NATO Storage Annex, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Henner scrutinizes the planetary epidermis through the eyes of Google Earth, hunting for censored portions of the Earth’s surface we are not permitted to see, making them all the more interesting and mysterious. In the Netherlands, military zones are camouflaged with a mesh of irregular polygons whose sophisticated geometry and chromatic range would have delighted the neoplasticists. It seems that NATO has recruited a few Mondrians and van Doesburgs to work in military counter-intelligence.

— Joan Fontcuberta, A Post-photographic Manifesto

DUTCH LANDSCAPES

When Google introduced its free satellite imagery service to the world in 2005, the remarkable global vistas revealed by this technology were not universally embraced.

Governments concerned about the sudden visibility of political, economic and military locations exerted considerable influence on suppliers of this imagery to censor sites deemed vital to national security.

One of the most vociferous censors were the Dutch, hiding hundreds of significant sites including royal palaces, fuel depots and army barracks. The Dutch method was notable for its stylistic intervention compared to other countries; imposing bold, multi-coloured polygons over sites rather than the subtler and more standard techniques employed in other countries. The result is a landscape occasionally punctuated by sharp aesthetic contrasts between secret sites and the rural and urban environments surrounding them.

These interventions sit alongside physical alterations made to the Dutch landscape through a vast land reclamation project that began in the 16th Century. A third of the Netherlands lies below sea level and the dunes, dykes, pumps, and drainage networks engineered over hundreds of years have dramatically shaped the country’s landscape.

Seen from the distant gaze of Earth’s orbiting satellites, the result is a landscape unlike any other; one in which polygons recently imposed on the landscape to protect the country from an imagined human menace bear more than a passing resemblance to a physical landscape designed to combat a very real and constant natural threat.

Frederikkazerne, Den Haag, South Holland Archival pigment print 80x90cm / 150x168cm

NATO Storage Annex, Coevorden, Drenthe Archival pigment print 80x90cm / 150x168cm

Unknown Site, Noordwijk aan Zee, South Holland Archival pigment print 80x90cm / 150x168cm

Mauritskazerne, Ede, Gelderland Archival pigment print 80x90cm / 150x168cm

Noordeinde Palace, The Hague, South Holland Archival pigment print 80x90 / 150x168cm

Staphorst Ammunition Depot, Overijssel Archival pigment print 80x90cm / 150x168cm

Fifty-One US Military Outposts

2010

Fifty-One US Military Outposts, Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, London

Mishka Henner has used freely available aerial imagery from satellite systems such as Google Earth for many of his projects. For Fifty-One US Military Outposts, he used information available from the public domain to picture US military bases around the world. These bases are part of the semi-secret locations that mark the present power of the US military. Henner’s intention was to depict this world from a military perspective, a world of pure strategy and logistics that controls space from above and below.

— Paul Wombell, British Journal of Photography

FIFTY-ONE US MILITARY OUTPOSTS

Overt and covert military outposts used by the United States in fifty-one different countries across the world. Sites located and gathered from information available in the public domain, official US military and veterans’ websites and forums, domestic and foreign news articles, and official and leaked government documents and reports.

Prime Base Engineer Emergency Force, Camp Justice, Diego Garcia Archival pigment print, 38x31cm / 150x150cm

US Army Group BENELUX, Chièvres Air Base, Belgium Archival pigment print, 38x31cm / 150x150cm

Pine Gap Joint Defence Space Research Facility, Alice Springs, Australia Archival pigment print, 38x31cm / 150x150cm

Naval Support Activity, Manama, Bahrain Archival pigment print, 38x31cm / 150x150cm

Central Region Storage Facility, Sanem, Luxembourg Archival pigment print, 38x31cm / 150x150cm

379th Air Expeditionary Wing, Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar Archival pigment print, 38x31cm / 150x150cm

LIST OF WORKS Dutch Landscapes

Vaquillas Ranch, Webb-County, TX

Artillery Schiet Kamp, ‘t Harde, Gelderland

Wasson Oil & Gas Field, Yoakum County, TX

De Peel Patriot Missle Site, Limburg Frederikkazerne, The Hague, South Holland

Fifty-One US Military Outposts

Mauritskazerne, Ede, Gelderland

Portfolio of fifty-one prints plus title page and map

NATO Storage Annex, Coevorden, Drenthe Navigatiestation, Den Helder, North Holland

Landfall

Noordeinde Palace, The Hague, South Holland

Fifteen vinyl picture discs housed in a flight case

Prins Maurits Army Barracks, Ede, Gelderland Staphorst Ammunition Depot, Overijssel

Turbines

St Haagsche Schoolvereeniging, The Hague, South Holland

Camp Grove Wind Farm, IL

Unknown Site, Noordwijk aan Zee, South Holland

Intrepid Wind Farm, Sac County, IA

Willem Lodewijk van Nassau Kazerne, Vierhuizen, Groningen

Macho Springs, Luna County, NM Meadow Creek Wind, Bonneville County, ID

Eighteen Pumpjacks

Montezuma Wind, Solano, CA

Portfolio of eighteen prints plus title page

Ocotillo Wind, Imperial County, CA Nine Canyon, Benton County, WA

Feedlots

Perrin Ranch, Coconino County, AZ

Black Diamond Feeders, Herington, KS Centerfire Feedyard, Ulysses, KS

Evaporation Ponds

Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, TX

APS Redhawk Power Plant, Arlington, AZ

Friona Feedyard, Palmer County, TX

Mesquite Evaporation Pond 1, Arlington, AZ

Randall County Feedyard, Amarillo, TX

Mesquite Evaporation Pond 2, Arlington, AZ

Tascosa Feedyard, Bushland, TX Wrangler Feedyard, Tulia, TX

Solar Antelope Valley Solar Ranch 1, Mojave Desert, CA

Fields

Alpine Solar, Rosamond, CA

Cedar Point Oil Field, Harris County, TX

East Pecos Solar, Pecos County, TX

Field (North Ward Estes, Ward County, TX

Garland Solar Power, Rosamond, CA

Kern River Oil Field, Kern County, CA

Silver State Solar, San Bernardino County, CA

Levelland Oil Field, Hockley County, TX

Solar Star 2, Rosamond, CA

Levelland Oil Field #1, Hockley County, TX Levelland Oil Field #2, Hockley County, TX Natural Butte Oil Field, Uintah County, UT San Andres Oil Field, Hockley County, TX

COLLECTIONS Arts Council England Collection

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (nato)

Centre Pompidou, France

New York Public Library

The Fidelity Corporate Art Collection

Richard and Ellen Sandor Collection

The Hoffman Collection, Texas

Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tosetti Value per l’Arte

Museum of Fine Arts, Texas

University of Salford Art Collection

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

William T. Hillman Collection

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri

BIOGRAPHY Mishka Henner, b.1976 (French British Belgian) Mishka Henner is a visual artist born in Belgium and living in the UK. His varied practice navigates through the digital terrain to focus on key subjects of cultural and geo-political interest. He often produces books, films, photographic, and sculptural works that reflect on cultural and industrial infrastructures in a process involving extensive documentary research combined with the meticulous reconstruction of imagery from materials sourced online. His work has featured in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Centre Pompidou Metz, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, FOAM Amsterdam, and Turner Contemporary, Margate. He was awarded the Infinity Award for Art by the International Center of Photography. He was short-listed for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in the same year and in 2014, was short-listed for the Prix Pictet.

CREDITS photo credits: p18, 36, 38, 40, 42: Tiziano Doria / p68-9: Mark McNulty / p70-1: Lucas Olivet / p118: Robin Reeve. Thanks to August, Lucien, Liz, Alexandrine, William, Renata Bianconi, Bruce Silverstein. Carroll/Fletcher, Fraenkel Gallery, Karen Newman, Open Eye Gallery, Nathalie Herschdorfer and Le Musée des beaux-arts, Le Locle.