Minerva Cuevas's site-specific mural Dust Rising from the Dances sits under the big skies of the Southwest, presenting an allegory of human nature and its conflict with the industrial progress.
A hybrid tree-cloud sports an omnipresent General Electric logo together with local flora and fauna—a reminder of the extractive history in New Mexico and the disruption of the land’s water cycles. Traveling from the surface down into the depths of the earth, fracking disrupts and destroys biodiversity as well as the paleontological and archaeological wealth found underground. Through Cuevas's pictorial storytelling, images become systems of signifiers luring us into an archeology of economic historical actors invoking the sacred rain falling from the skies.
