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Close Encounter with the California Sublime 2004

In Close Encounter with the California Sublime, Suzanne Husky alters Albert Bierstadt's painting, Merced River, Yosemite Valley (1866), by adding a tourist family taking a selfie with a California grizzly bear. Landscape paintings during the mid-19th Century portrayed the land as verdant, wild, and magnificent. However, these paintings were often commissioned by railroad tycoons, who were profiting from Western expansion. A consequence of this development was the displacement and genocide of the indigenous inhabitants. Husky's intervention asks viewers to consider how the wilderness and its wildlife continue to be commodified in a culture centered on consumption and exploitation.