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Work by David Benjamin Sherry at Morán Morán's booth. Photo: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews

David Benjamin Sherry at Morán Morán

A massive (70-by-90 inches) purple c-print by David Benjamin Sherry showing an aerial view of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah hangs along one wall in Morán Morán’s booth. Shot using a large-format camera, the image shows an altered or alternative view of this landscape, one often thought of as rugged and uninhabited. Sherry is interested in destabilizing this romanticized, white-Western vision of these places, queering them with his use of vibrant photographic pastels along the way.

Part of his “American Monuments series” that he begun in 2017 shortly after the start of the first Trump presidential administration, this body of work seeks to reexamine the history of photography and our relationship to the land at a time when the Trump administration was lifting the protect status of numerous national parks to lease the land for different kinds of extractive processes.