DAVID ALAN BOYD studio

The projects in this gallery explore some of the big issues facing US society: racism, xenophobia, and the threat of nuclear war.

This short video will be released 'into the wild' in the summer of 2021. America speaks to the cultural myth of the founding of the United States and those who were and continue to be denied the promise of freedom.

The US-Mexico border stretches 1,951 miles, from the Pacific Ocean, to the Gulf of Mexico. 651 miles of the border are fenced, 20 of those miles of fence divide El Paso, Texas and Cuidad Juarez, Mexico: a contiguous urban area with 2 million residents. On a 2015 visit to El Paso, I photographed a portion of The Fence from Downtown El Paso/Juarez northwest to the Mexico-Texas-New Mexico border, then west across the desert towards the border crossing at Santa Teresa.

The Border Fence is extremely visually compelling, in its division of the desert and urban landscapes. In places, it can be seen from many miles away as it traverses the desert landscape. I other locations, as in these photographs, it is a semi-permeable screen that separates one human community from another. It is both a monumental presence, and a potent symbol of trans-national classism, economic exploitation, and political failure on both sides of the border. It is also a tool of political propaganda that, in its very monumentality, deflects attention from the issues of social, economic, and environmental justice; the issues that create the conditions that justify The Fence, or as President Donald Trump called it: The Wall.

The Fence is a difficult subject. It challenges intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. It embodies a split in the collective national psyche: we are a nation of immigrants that is willing to take extraordinary measures to deflect new immigrants from our border –resisting the opportunity to see our neighbors as fellow human beings. In the presence of The Fence (impenetrable fencing, surveillance cameras, 24 hour lighting, armed guards), the feeling of being restricted by prison walls is overwhelming. Faced with The Fence, I question what it is that we are withholding from ourselves, and what it is that we are trying to keep within our own borders.

While working on the Death Valley photographs, I became very interested in the landscape of the Great Basin, and in the course of research, became aware of that part of Nevada once known as the Nevada Test Site. Between 1951 and 1992 the US government exploded hundreds of thermonuclear devices, initially in atmospheric tests, and later underground tests.

This gallery is a selection from a small body of work from that time. They are digital paintings of a post-apocalyptic landscape. These framed and enhanced satellite mapping images are of an area known as Yucca Flat; prominently visible in the images are craters created by underground nuclear explosions. While the US government claim was that underground tests had little to no radioactive leakage, there is evidence that the leakage was significant. Above ground tests conducted before 1963, and later shallow underground tests, spread substantial radioactive fallout across the west and the Great Plains.. While it is very difficult for researchers to determine the full scope of the societal cost of these tests, it is fair to say that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of US, Canadian, and Mexican citizens died prematurely from cancers as a result of testing.

The Nevada Test Site is purportedly inactive, and has been conveniently re-named with the double-speak moniker the Nevada National Security Site, but the threat of nuclear war is greater than ever, and is for the most part absent from the public consciousness and discourse. These images provide a grim visual reminder of the grotesque destructiveness of these weapons and the harm that they have done, and even their even greater potential harm.

What Man Hath Wrought, 36" x 36" archival print on watercolor paper