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'Satellite Landscapes' Offer A God's-Eye View Of Our Own Unmaking

By extracting infrastructures from Google Maps, Jenny Odell recreates landscapes of power, manufacturing, waste, and transportation.

Ever gazed up at the night sky and been humbled by the sheer scale of it all? Same here, but different.

As part of her solo exhibition, Infrastructures, at Intersection for the Arts Gallery in San Francisco, Bay Area native Jenny Odell created four 5'x3' digital works on paper that feature industrial infrastructures cut from Google Maps and reposed into new landscapes on large white sheets of paper. The four Satellite Landscapes, known individually as Transportation Landscape, Waste Landscape, Manufacturing Landscape, and Power Landscape repurpose her precise extractions into collages of industrial history; seen from above, man's Great Work is at once arresting as it is impotent.

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The four pieces that make up Satellite Landscapes, on display at Intersection for the Arts Gallery. Images via

From the artist's statement:

"Even as testaments to the best in engineering, the structures take on a tragic air. They are already monuments; that is, they are monuments of a time (now) when the world careened toward total environmental irresponsibility, when more and more was borrowed against a disappearing future and we all knew it. Inside the plants, everything has been maximized and streamlined, but the plants themselves form the constellation of something whose logic is closer to that of a tired man who’s lost all his money in a windowless casino and now slumps forward to play some more. This is the tragic air: that they look already like dinosaurs, like relics of a failed time from the perspective of a time when we will know better—or when we are no longer here."

Odell's selections are as varied as they are structurally universal. From Palo Verde to the Port of Tokyo (which, subtracted from its city, looks more like one of the millions of tuna steaks it exports than a major international seaport), the end results are four post-industrial landscapes that could be, well, anywhere on Earth. But what interests Odell most are these structures' places as signifiers. To Odell, her extracted infrastructures are “like hieroglyphs that say: people were here.”

Below, selections from Satellite Landscapes:

Jenny Odell's Infrastructures is currently on display at Intersection for the Gallery Arts until March 29. Check out more of the artist's work here.