Books by Jason Weems

Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest

by Jason Weems

To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon—and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself.
Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood’s iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision’s fundamental contribution to regional identity—to Midwesternness as we understand it.
Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century.

Out of Site Survey Science and the Hidden West

by William L. Fox, Britt Salvesen, Jason Weems, Amy Scott

Out of Site explores the invisible landscapes of the American West through the interwoven forces of art and technology over the past 170 years. This interdisciplinary project features an array of visual media, including historical, modern, and contemporary photography, that punctuate a series of essays by art scholars alongside first-person perspectives from artists working "in the field" today. Beginning with the survey era, the publication mines the use of wet-plate photography to penetrate the visible surface of the land to visualize the geological processes, mineral resources, and human histories that formed the foundation of the American empire. With the turn of the century, the relationship between sight and site grew increasingly remote, revealing patterns of large-scale industrial transformation, including the rise of nuclear technology and the American military-industrial complex. And with the modern use of long-range drones, satellites, and other adapted photographic technologies in the postwar years, new matrices of power and surveillance are revealed alongside the human and environmental fallout they often leave behind.



Contributors: William L. Fox, Mark Klett, Hillary Mushkin, Britt Salvesen, Kim Stringfellow, Jason Weems, and Will Wilson

Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science 1945-1990

by W. Patrick McCray, Jason Weems

An interdisciplinary guide to the 20th-century Southern California-based artists who investigated phenomena from the realms of optical science, astronomy, aerospace engineering and math

Published with Palm Springs Art Museum.

The synergy between art and science is an age-old tale; artists throughout time, from Leonardo da Vinci to Beeple, have incorporated newly discovered scientific theories and techniques into their practices. The PST ART project Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science explores a particularly fecund yet underexplored period in the history of art and science's cross-fertilization. The development of postwar industry and research in Southern California inspired a host of artistic innovations; for decades, abstract artists from the region experimented with color, form and mediums, variously employing ideas or procedures gleaned from the latest developments in physics, astronomy and mathematics.
Particles and Waves unites several generations of artists working in diverse materials and styles to visualize light, energy, motion and time. Boasting a gorgeous cover, the volume features a wide array of artists and topics, from Man Ray's paintings of mathematical models to Lee Mullican's computer-inspired abstractions, and from to the West Coast Minimalists and Light and Space artists' (including Mary Corse, Fred Eversley and James Turrell) rigorous studies of light to Bettina Brendel and Helen Lundeberg's investigations of scale through their paintings of subatomic and astronomical subjects.