In Phantom Sun, Breiding, an interdisciplinary artist who employs photography, video, as well as archives to examine ecological care, pulls from the “killed negatives” a trove of rejected photographs from the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the government agency established in the mid-1930’s to provide aid to farmers during the Great Depression. These photographic negatives were hole punched, marking them as unprintable, often for failing to reinforce the public narrative shaped by the FSA and by Roy Stryker, Chief of its Historical Section.
Breiding revives these discarded negatives to give them new agency. By reanimating these fragmented views of the Great Depression, the artist reframes the New Deal’s vision of American farm life against today’s political climate. A combination of archival images and newly produced works, the installation overlays past and present histories of ecological precarity and resilience, exploring ways of caring for the land and its memory in the American context.
The project unfolds as a material meditation on a government information campaign, revealing how both its subject (rural dwellers) and its medium (photography) depend on natural resources and processes of extraction. Shifting the focus from the human to the nonhuman, from the social to the environmental, Breiding juxtaposes a selection of day-to-day images of terrains and agrarian activities with recent photograms, collages on aluminum, still lifes on silver gelatin and inkjet prints, and candle drips–the artist’s own experiments with light, minerals, and animal-derived products, three essential elements in the making of photography.
The result is a capacious sculptural riff on the landscape tradition: a post-nature, post-industrial tableau in which the narrative of crisis extends to the land, and the nostalgia for pastoral America dissolves into the uncanny.
