Hannah Rubin

Through juxtaposition of rock, concrete, and water at sites of damming along the Colorado River (the most heavily dammed/managed river in the U.S.), this series of eight “landscape photographs” explore the soft and hard power that affectively tangle within the architectures of systems of water management. An image of seemingly naturally turbulent water is actually the froth of water being forcibly spurted out of a spillway, while a mowed green “country club” lawn is actually a calculated floor of grass grown atop a power plant to cool the turbines working below. Water shifts colors as it flows along the river, and various forms peek in to gesture at the varieties of complex containment that may or may not be visible to ordinary viewers.

This work engages with the tropes of landscape photography and the digital image as a meditation on the nested and entangled relationships between “Striation” and “Smoothness”, proposing a non-aligned and non-polar modality of thinking through our human relationship to the more-than-human world in which we are embedded and embodied.