Cara Despain: Cast Set

Emerson Dorsch is proud to present Cast Set, a project by Cara Despain.

In Cast Set, Despain layers sound, animation, and sculpture to approximate the experience of place in time. Exploiting tropes of the American West that are embedded in our collective psyche, the work conveys a doubling of mythos that is nostalgic, eerie, and dimly familiar. The identity of Despain as a native Utah is evident in her practice, motivating both conceptual and material choices. In Cast Set she constructs a world that at once embodies the type of optimism associated with the new frontier, and the loss that colors its inevitable settlement. She uses concrete, salt, and fools gold (pyrite ore) to reference the reconfiguring of land for mining, the promise of gold that conflates with a promise of salvation and religious freedom, and the certain disappointment of false hope.