An-My Lê, Dark Star/Grey Wolf @Marian Goodman

JTF (just the facts): A paired installation of two new bodies of work, the Grey Wolf images installed unframed against white walls in a freestanding curved-wall cyclorama and the Dark Star images framed and hung against black walls in a series of rooms on the main floor of the gallery. (Installation shots below.)

Grey Wolf

  • 1 installation comprised of 7 vinyl prints, 2024, each sized roughly 48×65 inches, in an edition of 3+2AP
  • Individual images from the set are available as inkjet prints, 2024, sized roughly 48×65 inches, in editions of 5+2AP (one framed example below, flat to wall rather than curved)

Dark Star

  • 9 inkjet prints, 2024, sized roughly 48×60 inches, in editions of 5+2AP

Comments/Context: With An-My Lê’s excellent 2023 retrospective at MoMA (reviewed here) now in the rear view mirror, this succinct gallery show returns to the artistic present and brings us up to speed on her photographic projects made in the past year. The show combines two new bodies of work – aerial views from Montana and starscapes from Colorado – creating an indirect dialogue between the end of the world (in the sedately threatening form of buried nuclear missile silos) and the beginning (the sublime and enduring grandeur of the cosmos).

Lê has long been interested in the complex activities, historical echoes, and massive scale of the US military, having memorably documented everything from Vietnam War re-enactors and desert military training exercises to a broad catalog of US Navy missions and relief efforts. Her new pictures from the “Grey Wolf” series tackle the hiding-in-plain sight military subject of nuclear missile silos buried in the farmlands and mountain foothills of Montana. The title of the project refers to the Grey Wolf helicopters used to protect and support the ballistic missile sites.

At first glance, her aerial photographs might seem like any number of expansive Western landscapes seen from above, with vast dry grasslands and unforgiving rocky hills giving way to more controlled human settlements of regimented farmlands and crop irrigation circles organized by grids of ruler straight roads. But a close look reveals the telltale signs of nearly invisible military installations: small fenced off rectangles in the middle of nowhere, featuring little else besides flat hinged openings in the ground, with mysterious sheds, control center outbuildings, radio towers, and cars parked nearby. Against the backdrop of sunny blue skies dotted with clouds and seemingly endless natural flatlands in the surroundings, we might just miss the threat (and deterrence) these isolated places actually pose, which is of course the point.

Lê has installed these images on the curved walls of a cyclorama, a 360 degree installation technique she used previously (in her retrospective) to create a hybrid landscape mixing black-and-white images made in Vietnam, France, and Louisiana in the US. Here the rounded space is much tighter and more intimate, and between the actual curvature of the prints and the twisting angles of the images taken from the air, the effect is even more vertiginous and uneasy. While the installation amplifies the sense of simmering dread that goes along with unexpectedly identifying the missile silos in amidst the empty farmland, the photographs don’t necessarily need the special architectural install to land their understated punch.

Coming out of the brightly lit space of the cyclorama, Lê’s other new body of work “Dark Star” plunges us into darkness. The inversion takes a moment of visual adaptation, as the photographs are hung against black walls with the very dimmest of spotlights; only after a few seconds of eye adjustment do the rich details of these celestial skyscapes start to reveal themselves. All of the images were made at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, with dark craggy canyons, ancient cliff dwellings, and desert wastes providing the shadowed foreground to grand views of the Milky Way that fill the sky with muscular expansiveness. Between the relative sharpness of the blanket of stars and the surprising degree of clarity in the essentially black landscape below, the images have a sense of almost surreal magic, the glow of the night given texture and astonishing complexity.

If, like me, you are initially perplexed by how Lê combined precision in the sky with clarity in the foreground in the middle of the night, a small technical aside is worth a short detour. To get the stars sharp, Lê apparently used a classic astrophotography tool to help out – a star tracker motor drive tripod mount that spins at the same rate at which the earth rotates, thereby preventing long star exposures from turning into elongated lines. And to keep the foreground from drifting to complete darkness, she took separate exposures of the landscape and sky and then made digital image composites, not unlike the way 19th century photographers merged sea and sky.

Knowing these few technical details doesn’t diminish the grandeur of these photographs in any way. Up close, the skies are filled with tactile celestial details, with the tiny colored lines of satellites zipping across otherwise static regions of darkness. Several of the images feature small foreground notes, including pinyon pines and old fire lookout towers, or look down into the sandy areas of mesas and canyons with hints of cave dwellings. Many of the images quickly become awestruck color stories, with subtle ranges and gradients of deep purple, pink, and yellow spotted by endless whorled pinpricks of white, the scenes then further decorated with the bright orange glow of nearby cities and settlements.

Seen together, the “Grey Wolf” images offer a more direct extension of military themes that Lê has wrestled with in the past, perhaps with an even deeper sense of embedded-in-our-lives foreboding, while the “Dark Star” pictures balance that incipient paranoia with a more soothing, bigger picture balm. Lê’s quietly anxious missile silo landscapes are inherently more energized and unsettling, but perhaps the skyscapes can soften that grim simmering tension, asking us to see time and space (and our place in them) with wider and more forgiving measures.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are individually priced at $35000 (Grey Wolf) or $40000 (Dark Star) each. Lê’s work has very little consistent secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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Read more about: An-My Lê, Marian Goodman Gallery

One comment

  1. Peter /

    Although you separately review Boris Mikhailov in the gallery directly upstairs, you don’t mention how that comparison (same gallery, same building) refracts on An-My Le’s work.

    I was intrigued by the star tracking images at first, but then on visiting upstairs, they paled into decorative works, compared to Mikhailov’s tougher exhibition. Not sure MG gallery should have put them together, although I applaud them having a double photography show in their prestigious space!

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