There’s a postcard display in the Dia Beacon bookstore, by the register. In an especially beautiful image, featuring Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, 1973–76, the Great Basin Desert landscape is cut into concentric circles by a view through two of the steel-and-concrete tubes that compose the monumental work, an off-center sun flare fuzzing out a section of dark horizon. Another photo of a Land art site stewarded by Dia captures the moon rising in a purple sky over the New Mexico plateau where Walter De Maria’s legendary expanse of stainless-steel poles, The Lightning Field, 1977, is installed. I also pick up an aerial shot of Robert Smithson’s iconic Earthwork Spiral Jetty, 1970, in which three people, walking along the coiled path, look like ants.
But I’m here to visit Cameron Rowland’s “Properties,” curated by Jordan Carter and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, an exhibition that occupies a conventional, white-walled exhibition space in the museum’s Riggio galleries, or so it might seem initially. At the heart of the artist’s show is Plot, 2024, represented here—inside—by a small, shaded triangle on a map. In the surveyor’s drawings of the Hudson Valley property owned by the institution, you can see that it represents a single acre—one of 32. Beginning near the southeast corner of the Dia Beacon building, it runs parallel to a creek, pointing, like an arrow, away from the back of the museum. It can’t be seen from the gallery, which is located near Dia’s front entrance, and no photographs are included in the artist’s stark presentation of documents and just a few objects. I take pictures, though.
Rowland, who is in their 30s, has been exhibiting for only a decade or so, but they have, since the outset of their career, gained attention for their exacting conceptualism, its balance of cryptic gestures and distilled exposition, as well as for the subject matter of their art: racial capitalism. In using contractual relations to unveil institutional histories and complicities—and perhaps especially in making their work unavailable to purchase (the artist negotiates rental and loan arrangements)—Rowland sails against the headwinds. They are something of an anomaly in this era of frictionless transactions, in an art system that rewards thinking small. With "Properties," they further develop the most ambitious element of their largely dematerialized practice. They engage with notions of monumentality and permanence, advancing an expansive vision of reparations—and challenging the very category of real estate—through Land art.
