Hans Schabus: Deserted Conquest Published by SITE Santa Fe.
Edited by Katia Zavitovski, Joanne Lefrak. Text by Laura Heon. Renowned for disrupting and reconfiguring space in unexpected ways, Austrian artist Hans Schabus, born in 1970, produces site-specific installations that use spatial displacement to debunk cultural symbols. For his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Schabus made Deserted Conquest, a 15,000-square-foot installation commissioned by SITE Santa Fe, 2007. Taking the New Mexico landscape as his subject, he created a series of confrontations that dismantle our cultural romanticism of the desert landscape and idealizations of "the West." This consisted of two new videos, sculptures, drawings and a variety of found objects, including a partially reconstructed mobile home and more than 100 tons of dirt. Viewers were encouraged to navigate the terrain freely, their tracks transforming the space over time. As a further conceit orchestrated by the artist, the catalogue's full-color images are photographed along cardinal lines, lending the reader a fresh perspective on the original exhibit.
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