Approached as a dialogue between the artists’ video installation and photograph within the archive/exhibition space, break down, re source presents two research-based practitioners rooted in experimental documentary filmmaking and photography. The two artists investigate possessions of land and its material evidence - markers, language, historical narratives - embedded within their respective spaces of inquiry.The Land Under Iron, 2017The Land Under Iron addresses the enduring legacy of colonialism and settlement in the American West. Borrowing the visual language of highway signs that orient the flow of traffic around road closures and construction zones, these works redirect passersby along an alternate axis of experience – offering a rumination on lines, boundaries, demarcations, and the ways in which systems of enclosure have ramified power from the 16th century to the present. Moving between Downtown Los Angeles, where tower cranes pierce the landscape, and San Pedro’s Fort MacArthur, a retired naval base overlooking the Port of Los Angeles, the project asks the viewer to navigate between two spatial forms etched onto the landscape: the construction zone that prefigures the luxury enclave and portends displacement, and the military fortification that points toward a history of imperial occupation and conquest. In the interstices roams the spectral figure of the puma, a reminder of that which precedes – and may supersede – these architectures of control.The Land Under Iron (DTLA) draws on the work of the Federal Writers Project, which details settlers’ speculative relationship to land during the California real estate boom of the 19th century. The Land Under Iron (Fort MacArthur) was composed with Armin Fardis, whose research explores the experience of carcerality in the history anti-colonial thought. Redeployed in the archive, the works function as both documents and reenactments, seeking to render visible and activate lines of conflict that structure our experience of the contemporary city.End of the Line, 2014End of the Line addresses memory, entropy and the death of analogue photography via the historical and environmental significance of small town Keeler, California. The story of Keeler draws uncanny parallels to the death of analogue film and the photographic print. During the early 20th century, Keeler was a thriving community alongside Owen’s Lake at the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. However, the demand for water from rapidly growing Hollywood and Los Angeles drained the lake’s waters. Once dry, silver dust was discovered on the lake bottom and sold to film processors like Kodak. Today, Keeler is a modern day ghost town, its resources either extinguished or obsolete. End of the Line is a digital photograph that depicts a rubbing (drawing) of a commemorative brass plaque, a monument of sorts, that in its liminal position and extreme geography atrophies and will soon be buried beneath a silver dust.