Drift Alignment

artist: Andrew O’Brien

dates: December 2, 2023 - January 27, 2024

Drift Alignment is the title of Andrew O’Brien’s an ongoing body of work that engages the complex and contested history of the US-Mexico border through the practices of astrophotography and celestial navigation. The series engages both the material and ideological conditions that led to the formation of the border, as well as its lasting relationship with colonialism, and the tragic consequences of immigration enforcement. Throughout, works oscillate between attempts at precision and its inverse– both subjective experience and mathematical error–to build a more poetic understanding of the region and its inhabitants.

Photographic and video works in the series are based on a combination of archival information related to the border surveys during the mid-nineteenth century, eighteenth century Spanish missionary activity, and contemporary GIS data for migrant deaths in southern Arizona. Other work was produced during extended visits to sites that are tied to his past and present connection with the border, as well as historically significant locations that point to the shifting ways of perceiving and understanding of the lands of the American southwest.