SEAN MICKA

The Color of Heat: Condition Report: Deregulation (2011-2013)

Condition Report: Deregulation is a cycle of three paintings based on LANDSAT satellite photographs published by NASA in the 1970s. The images depicted Antarctica, the Amazon, and a desert concealing underground aquifers. Rendered in blue, red, and yellow—the primary colors emphasized by LANDSAT’s heat-sensor imaging system—the works foregrounded color as both an optical and political code. While these technologies were presented as tools of scientific knowledge, they were also instruments of surveillance, designed to map natural resources for potential extraction and commodification.

By focusing on these three sites, the project engaged with the geopolitics of climate change. Antarctica, the Amazon, and desert aquifers represent zones of fragility, abundance, and scarcity, each implicated in the accelerating transformations of the earth under global capitalism. Importantly, the images were captured during the 1970s, a period marked by the rise of neoliberal policies and “deregulation,” which intensified the plunder of natural resources through processes of primitive accumulation.

In this way, Condition Report: Deregulation extended my exploration of memory, value, and erasure into the domain of the planetary. If the resistance portraits confront historical amnesia, the auction-object paintings interrogate commodity circulation, and the velvet folds meditate on time and surface, these landscape-based works ask how technologies of vision participate in the forgetting and exploitation of the earth itself.