No Return

Exhibition at Alexander and Bonin , New York of No Return (2017), a single channel video projection.

No Return was shot in Braddock, a town once known as the “cradle of Western Pennsylvania’s steel industry,” before suffering from its collapse in the 1980s. While the work engages with the landscape as it looks today, it also approaches it as both a repository for the memories of past experiences and a witness to the ravages of socio-economic change. In looking at the present, No Return visualizes our shared apprehension about the future.

Doherty’s approach and process is speculative. Often taking an existing image or other information as a starting point, he then proceeds to see what can be discovered or found in a location. No Return extends Doherty’s interest in the relationship between landscape and memory and working in locations that bear the traces of contested histories and narratives; some forgotten, some half remembered.