The Brooklyn Rail

“Appalachia is, often simultaneously, a political construction, a vast geographic region, and a spot that occupies an unparalleled place in our cultural imagination,” wrote writer and historian Elizabeth Catte in her galvanizing 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, noting that, in all of these instances, defining it “is often a top-down process, in which individuals with power or capital tell us who or what we are.” That top-down process often comes at the hands of extraction of the land’s natural resources; of people, labor, and families; and of culture, particularly through sensationalist documentary photography and slanted media narratives. West Virginia-born Jonas N.T. Becker knows these complexities all too well, and A Hole is not a Void, their largest museum exhibition to date, brings together a decade and a half of conceptual photography, video, and subtly altered found objects to delve into these entanglements from a systemic level.

Because of the Wexner Center’s deconstructed architecture, the show begins below ground. Becker skillfully integrates this peculiarity of the museum building into their conceptual presentation of works related to harmful coal mining practices, creating an atmosphere in the lower-level gallery where the black walls, dim lighting, and the viewer's sense of tunneling down make it feel less a creative solution and more like destiny. Downstairs, the series “Better or Equal Use” (2020-present) is the most tantalizing and theoretically rich in the show, a typology of sorts in the vein of Bernd and Hilla Becher but with a much more cynical bent.

Becker documents former sites of the mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining process, an extractive practice that’s as horrendous and literal as it sounds. With “MTR,” picturesque peaks are blown apart to reach the thin seams of coal buried miles below; the blasted detritus fills nearby valleys, leveling out the landscape from both angles. Thanks to an ambiguously worded clause in “The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977,” the radical operation is allowed as long as the mining site is redeveloped for “an equal or better economic or public use of the affected land.” As Becker documents, the judgment is suspicious and highly partisan, with sites becoming home to federal prisons, big-box stores, golf courses, and other sites of cultural extraction and labor exploitation.

For the works in “Better or Equal Use,” beauty is a strategy. With its wide-open road flanked by mountain ranges on each side, the photograph Better or Equal Use: Federal Correctional Institution, McDowell on the former Indian Ridge Mountain (2020/24) feels like a cinematic establishing shot from a road trip film but one that leads to a twisted destination: a medium-security prison that benefits from the locale's seclusion. The photograph’s unique printing process, self-devised by the artist, adds another layer of potent materiality and deceptive allure. Loosely inspired by nineteenth-century carbon printing, Becker incorporates coal from the depicted sites into the print’s chemical emulsion, making for one-of-a-kind positives awash in sepia-like hues, with a tonal range unmatched by contemporary processes. (It’s easy to see why carbon printing was also Alfred Stieglitz’s favorite.)

The coal-centric printing process aesthetically elevates these sites of destruction, helping you get lost in their depictions. The hypnotic Better Or Equal Use: Christine West “Bridge to Nowhere” on the former East River Mountain (2020/2024), for instance, leads the eye up a mountain and through a Robert Smithson-like spiral jetty, which, in actuality, is a dead-end highway. The romanticism of Becker’s images fades into a sinking dread as you contemplate all the methods of extraction involved in making such a photograph. Admiration swiftly becomes implication.

By putting the viewer in a subjective position, Becker challenges photography’s exploitative essence. Betty’s Knob (2024), a sculptural component of the series, adds to this tension. Tracing a 1957 geological survey with black tread tape, whose texture slightly sparkles in the gallery’s spotlights, Becker reminds you of the physical contours of the topography that is now destroyed, entangling you in the process.

A Hole is not a Void ends upstairs with two video scenes from the in-progress film Class Struggle (2024). Exploring “the transmission of politics across generations,” it probes why we follow in our parent’s political footsteps or rebel to embrace the other side. In one scene, Becker and their mother, Judith Transue, play the 1970s board game Class Struggle, a tongue-in-cheek, Marxist version of Monopoly, debating the relevancy of the game’s message half a century later. The video is filled with soulful and spirited conversation about pressing political issues, like climate change, the lack of public funding for education, and issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, sprinkled with comedy throughout. During one exchange, the two joke about the top hat game piece that symbolizes "The Capitalist," and Becker asks their mother what item of clothing might represent today’s predatory industrialists. "I don’t know,” Transue dryly answers, “Hawaiian shirts?"

The in-progress film brings the driving influence of Becker's continued critical project into sharp relief, especially after viewing the first segment where Transue recounts her days as a social worker, activist, and mayor. Almost since birth, Becker has been raised to question the larger forces that put an overwhelming majority of us into a state of precarity regarding environmental, economic, and even human rights issues. (“You celebrated your first birthday, I’m happy to say, in a stroller in Washington DC at the 20th Commemorative March [on Washington] for Jobs [and Freedom],” Transue remembers.) Becker's practice, then, transcends day-to-day concerns in order to make these faceless and overarching systemic issues visible.

Using imagery to inspire action while avoiding exploitation can feel like a Sisyphean task. In trying to bring awareness to pressing political issues, documentary photography often robs its subjects of their agency and permissive likeness. Yet, Becker doesn’t give up, continuing to find ways to entice viewers, putting them in new positions and pushing them to look at Appalachia’s troubles through a different lens. Leaving the Wexner feeling equally inspired but weighed down by the future, their mother’s words rang in my head: “This is a very long struggle. We are not required to complete the task, but neither are we free to leave it.”