ALEXA HOYER . Targets
Drive some 30 miles outside of Las Vegas, just off Highway 15 and you will discover a desert landscape occupied by mysterious objects: severed mannequin parts, perforated movie star pin-ups, sun-scarred wedding albums and strange assemblages of discarded consumer goods and debris. Decimated by firepower and bullet holes, these artifacts seem to lose their shape, volume and surface, dissolving into the environment like an organic property of the desert. They materialize in the distance like the ghostly residue of some faraway place, experience or culture.
Over the past few years, Alexa Hoyer has been visiting unofficial shooting ranges in Nevada to research, document and photograph homemade gun targets. Diverse in material, form and construction, these readymade sculptures punctuate the landscape with traces of artifact and story that are at once uncanny, violent, tranquil, menacing and even amusing.
By positioning the targets center-frame, Alexa bisects the violence and decay with a steady, fixed horizon of desert sky. Viewers stare down the barrel of the lens, or the perspective of the shooter, to observe a hidden constellation of gun culture and the American imagination.