Monsters, 2019

Monsters, an immersive video installation made in collaboration with Amelia Winger-Bearskin, anchors Wendy Red Star’s exhibition, A Scratch on the Earth. It screens inside a dome-shaped structure that resembles a traditional ceremonial sweat lodge, here cheekily covered in colorful Pendleton blankets, quilts, and sleeping bags and surrounded by plastic foliage. Shot with a VR rig provided by Google that can record 360-degree views, the work’s title evokes one tech writer’s description of the device as a “17-camera monster.” The shadow of this technological wonder looms over the sweeping landscapes it records. Shot in southern Montana where Red Star was raised on the Crow reservation, Monsters travels through a series of sites in the vicinity of the Pryor Mountains, land sacred to the Apsáalooke (Crow Nation), where actual monsters, mischievous, sometimes menacing creatures known as the Little People, are believed to reside. These diminutive but fearsome beings were blamed for a series of mysterious accidents that plagued the railroad line built through the Pryor Gap, a site where Apsáalooke ritually demonstrated respect for the Little People by leaving offerings such as beads, arrows, or meat, which in turn helped guarantee their own safe passage through the territory.

In eight static long takes, Red Star and Winger-Bearskin undertake a day’s journey into this land, rambling with their dogs across sub-alpine prairies, wide-open rocky expanses, into labyrinthian limestone caves, and down trails that betray traces of settler encroachment in the form of abandoned railroad beds and barbed wire fences. Along the way, Monsters navigates the legacies of photographic technologies that have participated in the dispossession of Indigenous land. Since the 1920s, multiple lens cameras have been used to survey large tracts of land, supporting governmental policies that enabled settlers to make claims on Apsáalooke territory. More spectacularly, 360-degree recording and projection has been deployed to naturalize this violent history, beginning with A Tour of the West, Disney’s inaugural Circarama presentation of 1955. Featuring eleven 16mm projectors, the attraction offered 360-degree views of landscapes already familiar from countless Westerns, including the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, providing a virtual expedition underwritten by the ideology of westward expansion.

While early experiments with projection in the round were marred by blind spots that emerged in the gaps between screens, Google’s camera system allows users to upload their files to the cloud where they are seamlessly stitched together. Nonetheless, surrounded by an unbroken horizon in Monsters, one experiences the nagging sense that something remains occluded from view. In a classic horror film, framing that emphasizes the vacancy of space induces dread, fear of what lurks just off screen. Here, instead, the idea that these places could be understood as empty (and thus available to be settled) is quietly undone. As each shot slowly unfolds, the land comes to be felt as a living site, home to creatures both seen and unseen. And though monsters fail to appear, the ghosts of history are all around.