Dylan McLaughlin

Dylan McLaughlin

  • Artist’s Statement

    We’re moving in a time of great calling. A heeding to recenter generative ecologies. Recalibrating to efforts of the acknowledgement, cultivation, and nourishment of intersectionality in present challenges. In confronting and celebrating the lineages from which we extend, we practice generating creative progression, ceremony, and dismantlement through embodied acts towards an end to an era of entropy.

    Generative approaches must be centered. Let’s move away from colonial and extractive terminologies - shoot, capture, document. Replace with generative terminologies - grow, gather, share. Language matters in our relationship to opening and dedicating to being in process. With the foundation of protocol, process unfolds. Collaboration and improvisation invite acts of deep listening, of honesty rather than truth. Acts of dialogue, exchange, offering witness, of creating land/body/place responsive works. When I say place, I am referring to notions of honoring, and when I say honoring I do not mean taking. I am referring to kinship to place as a practice of land acknowledgement. Acknowledgement as ceremony.

    Landscape creates frequency. A complex ensemble that orchestrates the way we use language, the way plants root, the way water flows, the way tectonic plates shift. It is possible to witness these frequencies - as light, as color, as geography, as migration - the ensemble of sounds that create place. To humans and animal kin, these frequencies are perceived audibly, as sound - biophony. To land, in the lower register, these frequencies are movement - geophony. These frequencies help clarify our understanding of the natural world. Human beings have embedded landscapes with infrastructure that disrupts acoustic ecologies - anthrophony. Jets fly overhead, power lines stretch across place, wireless communication emitted into the atmosphere, in a violent act of audible dissonance.

    Through these concepts, my creative practice is informed. I center community engagement and collaborative improvisation to produce what ultimately becomes sound works and experimental music compositions from geographic data sets, aerial videography, and other mediations on relationships to land and sites of extraction. Processing and performing legacies of colonial settler violence, this work is about land, bodies, and resonance.

  • Biography

    Dylan McLaughlin is a sound/video artist currently working in forms of resilience to and deconstruction of tensions in relationship to violence imbedded in land. Looking to sites of extraction, his work explores sonic forms of witness and implication. In his multi-media installation, interactive, and performative works, McLaughlin looks to engage the poetics and politics of landscape formation and human affect. These works respond to place, using materials that speak from landscapes, incorporating technology that activates or provides a container from which to experience. He is born of the Diné (Navajo) people. McLaughlin received his BFA in New Media Art from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is currently completing his MFA in Art and Ecology at the University of New Mexico.

  • Exhibitions

    • Identity as Material, Material as Identity I UNM ART Museum I Albuquerque, New Mexico I 2020
    • There Must Be Other Names for the River I National Hispanic Cultural Center I Albuquerque, New Mexico I 2019
    • Species In Peril I 516 Arts I Albuquerque, New Mexico I 2019
    • Resonant Affect I Ellsworth Gallery I Santa Fe, New Mexico I 2019
    • Songs of Tempestuous Rising and Falling I Ellsworth Gallery I Santa Fe, New Mexico I 2021

    Fore more information, please contact info@ellsworthgallery.com

Showing 1–12 of 18 artworks

Dylan McLaughlin

Field Notion -- Notation I
6 x 86 in. Photographic print in custom walnut frame

Dylan McLaughlin

Four Corners Power Plant Speaks Mountains 2
2.5 x 25.5 x 1.5 in, framed Photographic print in custom walnut frame

Dylan McLaughlin

San Juan Generating Station Speaks 1
5.5 x 43.25 x 2.5 in, framed Photographic print in custom walnut frame

Dylan McLaughlin

San Juan Generating Station Speaks 2
7 x 17.75 x 2.25 in, framed Photographic print in custom walnut frame

Dylan McLaughlin

Lines (2)
Photographic print in custom walnut frame

Dylan McLaughlin

Lines (2)
Photographic print in custom walnut frame

Dylan McLaughlin

Songs of Tempestuous Rising and Falling
Cottonwood, Speaker

Dylan McLaughlin

Four Corners Power Plant Speaks Mountains
6.25 x 72 x 3.5 in, framed Photograph in Baltic Birch Frame Sold

Dylan McLaughlin

Coyote Station Power Plant Speaks
4 x 48 x 1.5 in, framed Photographic print in custom walnut frame

Dylan McLaughlin

Four Corners Power Plant Speaks
4.5 x 49.5 x 2.5 in, framed Photographic print in custom walnut frame

Dylan McLaughlin

Mexican Hat Disposal Cell Speaks
10 x 47 ″ Aerial Digital Photography

Dylan McLaughlin

Rio Grande Speaks
10 x 47 ″ Aerial Digital Photography