Albert Bierstadt’s sweeping American West landscapes—of pristine, bucolic valleys and dramatic sierras—were likely the most unabashed painterly contributions to the 19th century’s Manifest Destiny. For Bierstadt, America was the great unfettered and free wilderness, but it was a fantasy, akin to today’s foraging Kinfolk spread or a survivalist family’s reality TV series.
Joseph DeLappe’s Bierstadt Drones project is pretty straight-forward: he takes Bierstadt landscapes, and has a Predator or Reaper drone do a GIF “flyby”. Arguably, there’s a redundancy in initiating such a meme-ready Tumblr project, especially one that could conceivably be construed as so single note. But taken as a whole, you see a timeliness in Bierstadt’s idealized virgin landscapes, and how their overblown, gilded framed mythic stature has proliferated to such an extent that they’re likely being remapped for immersive Oculus Rift fantasies. And contrasting that enduring image with the now-norm buzzing of weaponizing drones—eventually the commercial versions will likely be a common sight in most cities—it suggests that our appetite for conquer and expansion has yet to be abated.
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