Touch and Go, Dionne Lee’s commissioned installation for the City of Berkeley’s Cube Space, curated by Leila Weefur, looks at the American landscape as a site of danger, survival, and inherited trauma.

Dionne Lee repurposes images from 1970s-90s wilderness survival manuals, rephotographing and printing them as large format collages that cover the street-visible gallery walls. Outdoor enthusiasts or former Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts may be familiar with such manuals, which now read as quaint, pre-Internet information sources. For others, the imagery and instructions feel like a foreign language – our minds and tongues stumble to speak and understand. Blown out landmarks and wilderness survival tools don’t meet their intended function as guides, but register as impotent, abstract forms. Lee’s layered compositions undermine the idea that landscape is innately knowable or neutral territory.

Exhibition review by Roula Seikaly