White Sands

Director: Cynthia Madansky
Cinematographer: Liz Cash, Cynthia Madansky
Sound Design: Steven Vitiello
16 mm ◊ 8 min. 3 projections

Both an Air Force base and a National Park, White Sands in southern New Mexico is a site of duality—of beauty and destruction. Amidst grand, wave-like dunes of natural gypsum the White Sands Missile Range was established in the 1940s as a testing ground for tools of war, and the devastation of these experiments still marks the landscapes. White Sands is among Cynthia Madansky’s most sensual and tactile projects, assembling and juxtaposing footage of these landscapes in an experiment with expanded cinema and triple projection.

A key contribution to the artist’s body of work engaging with the nuclear complex, which stretches from The PSA Project no.11: Fallout (2006) through to Flowers for LH (2021) and Index:Trace (2026), this atmospheric piece contracts the beauty of nature with the scars of its destruction, a tension heightened through grainy 16mm, hand printed film (in colors referencing uranium mining and milling) and in-camera effects, that lend an air of caustic poetry.

Across a body of work that has been long interested in meeting points—both at the level of borders but as explored in the nature of montage—the deployment of multiple images permits an enhanced level of contrapuntal interplay. Rather than a single landscape and limited perspective of nature, the deployment of multiple images produces a work that feels complex and cumulative. Instead, an ecosystem of exchange portrays not just the dynamism of the natural world, but the fraught relationship between these lands and the military influence that has been forcefully imposed upon it.