Reframing the American Landscape

In 1955, the US Department of the Interior's Bureau of Mines produced Arizona and Its Natural Resources, a short documentary film that was part of a broader series on US states and their mineral resources. 

First released to a domestic audience, Arizona was later copied and screened across Global South territories that the US sought to enfold into its emerging capitalist order as part of Cold War-era development aid programs. 

The original 16mm film, now warped and degraded, is accessible at the US National Archives and Records Administration, as one of countless state documentary artifacts that naturalize US territorial and cultural claims to the Americas. Through this film and others in the series, the US interior crossed borders into the hinterlands of the Global South: a screen onto which this interior was projected.

Conceived by Andy Lu Lee within the framework of the CCA's 2024-2025 Emerging Curator Residency Program, the exhibition Reframing the American Landscape presents a critical re-circulation of Arizona along the paths of its presentation and consequence: in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the film was once screened; and in Arizona, where Oaxacan workers now labour in the fields mythologized in the original film. 
As it moves through these locations, its re-projection, re-filming, and re-framing expose the political and physical precarity of a US-centric American landscape. The exhibition situates Arizona within an established state strategy where films are highly reproducible objects that carry US territorial claims. The state archive becomes an index of that claim, its plasticity, and its capacity to be endlessly remade elsewhere. 

The project also considers the archival object directly—plastic that travels, degrades, and warps—and positions it outside the state archive through other forms of media production, collection, and circulation. It engages Arizona through the light that enables its projection and hastens its degradation. Enlivened by its own material history, the archival document escapes the institution that gave it meaning—destabilizing the image it once carried and projecting it onto an American landscape outside its framing. 
The exhibition features a cut of Andy Lu Lee’s forthcoming film American Remediation, premiering in 2027.

We invite you to watch Andy Lu Lee’s opening talk and to read his first in a series of web articles, American Interiority and its Subjects, which surfaces the influence of image production on the construction of the American landscape.  

Reframing the American Landscape has been conceived by Andy Lu Lee, supported by the CCA's curatorial team including Megan Marin and Laura Aparicio Llorente, with research by Roberto Ransom Ruiz, digital production by Camille Lavallée Prairie, design development by Sébastien Larivière and Anh Truong, and graphic design by Kyla Arsadjaja. The video installation was developed in collaboration with cinematographer Owen Smith-Clark, editor Matt Hixon, and sound designer Emile Klein.

The CCA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Power Corporation of Canada, and the Architecture League of New York. 

About the CCA's Emerging Curator Residency Program
The CCA aims to continuously rethink and re-examine the scope and the boundaries of “curating architecture.” Initiated in 2011, the annual Emerging Curator Residency Program seeks proposals that use the curatorial project as a tool to foster ideas, to question relevant positions, to introduce new research themes, and to critique current modalities, with the ultimate goal of advancing new thinking for architecture and the built environment. The program includes a mentorship period that ensures the final candidates’ understanding of CCA culture and curatorial procedures. Past recipients include Yutong Lin, who recently released Zomia Garden as part of the CCA Singles series, alongside Clarissa Lim Kye Lee (Making Mamak), Joyce Joumaa (To Remain in the No Longer), Niklas Fanelsa (Patterns of Rural Commoning), Evangelos Kotsioris (Lab Cult), Sben Korsh and Maxime Decaudin (Market Landscape), Robert J. Kett (Prospects Beyond Futures: Counterculture White Meets Red Power), Víctor Muñoz Sanz (Off:Re:OnShore), Francesco Garutti (Misleading Innocence), Carrie Smith (Best Supporting Actor), and Dan Handel (First, the Forests).

Since 2021, the Emerging Curator Residency Program has replaced the Emerging Curator Program offered by the CCA since 2011, and is generously supported by the Power Corporation of Canada.

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