Drawing deserts, making worlds

deserts are not empty (2022)

This research demonstrates how 19th century visual representations of the desert have obscured and upheld the violent sociopolitical context of U.S. settler colonialism, and further, how they have been used to justify wholesale transformations of the desert for environmental and social exploitation by the United States. This research also proposes drawing the desert differently as a method for imagining its future as pluralistic, relational, and resistant to imperial forms of power. In drawing deserts from this pluralistic perspective, the literal collaging of multiple worldviews and viewsheds reveals how various ways of knowing the desert produces altogether new engagements with it.