The Evening Pink

The Evening Pink: Making the First Edition — intro film exploring the creation of the book, and the historical processes underpinning the project.


The Evening Pink, in brief: A Psychedelic (Anti-) Western shot at the twilight of climate fallout, The Evening Pink was created in landscapes severely affected by drought, fire, the disruption of seasons, and the total breakdown of ecosystems. A conscious revisiting of the Western genre, the project re-casts climate change in the role of looming violence on the Western frontier. 

The Evening Pink — Artists' Book. This hand-made photo book is the base for the forthcoming edition. 


The Evening Pink:

The Evening Pink depicts performers confronting “Climate Dysphoria” —  fears of civilization collapse through climate change — amidst landscapes severely affected by drought, fire, the disruption of seasons, and the total breakdown of ecosystems. A conscious revisiting of the Western genre, the project is comprised of unique photographic prints, books, and film-based works created between the Pacific Ocean and interior American West.

In The Evening Pink, photographs are made by documenting performances carried out in the real world. Neither strictly cinematic nor documentary, concept images from dreams and films meet the world through chance encounter. With this methodology, the Western becomes a tool to re-examine the American Mythology in contemporary landscapes experiencing climate fallout. 

The center of this engagement is fire. Whether constructed in the studio with cultural ephemera, or working inside active wildfires, The Evening Pink addresses latent, auto-destructive tendencies embedded in the American mythos. These tendencies are depicted as solitary acts — Burning Shopping Cart — but are manifestations of a collective cultural process. Through the creation of fire, the individual’s place in the wider anthropogenic phenomenon is revealed. Performers — and viewers — are implicated in the climate crisis, particularly their perpetuation of an unsustainable culture built on carbon combustion. These isolated fires accumulate— altering the global ecosystem, drying the American West, setting the stage for the mega-fires depicted in subsequent photographs.

The Evening Pink employs the Western genre to examine the physical, psychological, and ideological limit of the West as its unsustainable systems collide with an overstressed environment. For depicted performers — confronting political and ecological systems breaking down in their lives — working with this “limit experience” is clarifying, revealing. The project was created during mega-fires, where climate change becomes a tangible wall, the terminal limit for the Western world.

Cheatgrass (80x88” = 200x225 cm) — installed Nordic Light Festival, ‘20. Note: Cheatgrass is both the closing photograph in The Evening Pink and a related 16mm film.

The Evening Pink was photographed in landscapes that once served as Western film sets, a method chosen to visualize changes over the last century. These locations were often found engulfed by extreme weather events, though, particularly mega-fires. The final photograph in the project,Cheatgrass, depicts the words “THE END” — these 2.5x10 meter letters were constructed on the former set of the film The Misfits (1961) during an active, 40,000 acre fire (16,187 hectares). 

Cheatgrass recreates the closing scene of the classic Western, but re-casts climate change in the role of “impending violence on the Western frontier.” This role was traditionally personified through violent human enemies, and emblematized via the railroad and mining industry (stand-ins for Gilded Age Capitalism). The films end with a male hero protagonist riding into the sunset. In service of those left behind, the hero dies, fighting these unstoppable, encroaching, and at once collectively perpetuated forces. This individual vs. collective system dilemma continues in The Evening Pink, revealing an unsustainable Western world still in conflict with the environment, individuals confronting mega-fires that are collective creations, and climate fallout as a process of self-immolation. 

The Evening Pink — Artists' Book. This hand-made photo book is the base for the forthcoming edition. 

The Evening Pink has been made through a process emphasizing direct contact between analog photographic materials and a changing environment. Climatic processes enter from film capture to print: 4x5 and 8x10 film are regularly exposed to smoke, heat, harsh light. The material substrate records several natural processes including fluctuations in light, moisture, which are rendered on the surface of the film.

After film capture, physical photographs are created through positive transfer printing. A blend of printmaking and analog photography, prints are created through a process that responds to local weather conditions. No print can be replicated: books and digital presentations are produced from scanned, unique prints. Exhibited photographs are always unique prints.

The Evening Pink — Lecture & Film Screening at Nordic Light Festival 2020 (w/ Uncertain States Scandinavia)