No Return: so it is

No Return, 2017, a single channel video installation was shot on location in Braddock, Pennsylvania and first shown as part of the exhibition so it is, at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh. A series of related photographic works enhances and expands the research. The town of Braddock is located in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The town's industrial economy began in 1873, when Andrew Carnegie built the Edgar Thomson Steel Works. Braddock became the “cradle of Western Pennsylvania’s steel industry” but like many other steel towns, Braddock’s fortunes changed with the collapse of the steel industry in the United States in the 1980s. As a result of this decline, Braddock has since lost 90% of its population from its peak in the 1920s. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 with the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ forms part of the context against which the research and production of the work evolved. The promise to save the steel industry and coal mines rings hollow in the face of years of decline and underinvestment, and the denial of climate change. The research extends Doherty’s interest in the relationship between landscape and memory and in working in locations that bear the traces of contested histories and narratives. No Return is set in a fictional future where the planet is slowly dying as a consequence of pollution and climate change. However, the research is concerned with the present and engages with the landscape as it looks today, as a repository of the memories of past experiences and as a witness to the ravages of socio-economic change. The research advances the use of video installation as a new form of expression that integrates formal concerns and imagines and visualizes our shared apprehension about the future in a resolved and rigorous manner.