white sands: Photographs by Chris Bunney

On view at 511 Gallery

September 26 — November 7, 2024

511 Gallery is pleased to present white sands: Photographs by Chris Bunney,

with an opening reception on Thursday, September 26th from 6 to 8 p.m.

511 Gallery is pleased to present white sands: Photographs by Chris Bunney which opened on Thursday, September 26th. 

White sands: Photographs by Chris Bunney marks the New York-based artist's second solo exhibition at 511 Gallery. The series is of seventeen large-format, silver halide emulsion prints of White Sands, New Mexico—one of the world’s largest gypsum dune fields. Rich in texture and experimental in form, Bunney’s black-and-white photographs transform the dunes into an accessible and yet surreal landscape.

White Sands was first home to the Pre-Clovis people, whose fossilized footprints prove that humans had been living in the Tularosa Basin for over 23,000 years. Successive indigenous groups inhabited the region, including the Clovis, Jornada Mogollon, and Apache peoples, until the late 1590s when Spanish colonizers seized the land from the native Pueblo. They built infrastructure to extract and exploit natural resources, fundamentally altering the landscape and prompting the erosion of both land and indigenous heritage. In the 1800s, White Sands saw another wave of colonization as homesteading Americans journeyed westward, making New Mexico and the desert dunes a critical part of the nationalist project, Manifest Destiny. In 1848, the Mexican-American War resulted in the United States acquiring vast territories, including New Mexico, which further fueled westward expansion but also intensified conflicts over displaced indigenous populations. A century later, the territory was made a National Park. Today it is a major tourist draw, with over 600,000 visitors each year. 

Less recognized, however, is the region’s dense and complex military history. In 1945, White Sands Missile Range was established as the world’s premier testbed for hypersonic, long-range missiles and aerospace technology. One week after its opening, the world’s first atomic bomb, “Gadget,” was detonated from a 100-foot steel tower at the Trinity Site, approximately 60 miles north of White Sands National Park.

Now stretching across 3,200 square miles, the Range is self-governed by the U.S. Army, serving as its primary site for evaluating and honing lethal weaponry. The range additionally hosts unnamed private commercial-industrial entities, highlighting a particularly fraught relationship between national security and private equity. Chris Bunney visited White Sands with these varied contexts and histories in mind, making photographs that honor such complexity. 

Tuft pictures a rift in the gypsum dunes as it falls diagonally across the composition. The slender, spine-like curve of its ridge extends from a black, large width in the lower left foreground to faint strips in the center mid-ground to a vanishing point in the upper right edge of the pictorial space. These undulating lines act as waves, gently rippling on the dune’s surface. Subdued gray swaths and small, ghost-like marks cover the inner side of the rift, which plunges into vast whiteness. The spatial registers seem to flatten and condense as the desert plain’s horizon pushes the landscape toward our viewing position. In his development and treatment of the image, Bunney uses textural and optical elements to evoke a sense of immediacy.

Each print bears the mark of Bunney’s darkroom mastery: small speckles, dark swaths, and subtle stains lay across the photographic surface. The artist works tactically with chemicals, submerging and washing his prints in spontaneous and untraditional ways. Chance becomes a poetic element in his work, as Bunney harnesses the materiality of the medium, allowing the chemicals to author their own forms. The resulting images are one-of-a-kind, occupying a curious space between abstraction and representation, serendipity and plan. This push-and-pull honors the complexity of White Sands,   inviting viewers to consider the desert   according to its varied history. 

Our sense of wilderness is challenged as Bunney presents the dunes in organic form but subverts the traditional landscape photograph. The artist’s hand is present in white sands, as the latent images are transformed through man-made chemical abstractions. Altering the dunes in his representations, Bunney draws parallels between an intervening artist and the intervening human entities whose activities change and threaten the desert, actualizing humanity’s impact on the land and engaging with the many contexts that govern the usages and indeed the very existence of the dunefield.

The photographs that comprise white sands are quietly radical, pushing boundaries in process, form, and concept. Bunney simultaneously subverts traditional darkroom techniques, expands the scope of landscape photography, and invites a more nuanced consideration of White Sands, the place and site—a well-documented landscape that harbors several unrecognized and troubling histories. The artist and his photographs urge us to acknowledge a history of competing and complex desires, confronting the terrible aspects, as well as the fascination we keep for such evils, even from afar. White Sands is a transcendent example of the sublime. Bunney questions what is lost in our typical representations of these unsettling landscapes. His photographs reveal many unrecognized realities.

Chris Bunney earned a B.A. in English Literature from Tufts University, while enrolled in the combined degree program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the film production department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Post-graduation, he spent time working for SGE Entertainment, NBC, and Walt Disney, before later receiving an M.B.A. from Columbia University. Bunney founded Capitola Media in 2000, where he is now an Executive Producer, designing and executing projects for diverse clients that include Fortune 500 corporations, Hollywood studios, and internet startups.

white sands: Photographs by Chris Bunney was co-curated by Paige Glover and Natalie Beier. 

white sands: Photographs by Chris Bunney will be on view from September 26 – November 7, 2024, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 26, from 6 to 8 p.m. The artist will be present.

For more information and further questions, please contact the gallery by phone or via email at 511gallery@gmail.com