Satellite Ranch opened last weekend across a 10-acre sprawl in Austin, Texas, transformed into a playground for artists, craftspeople, and performers. The Texas event is an outpost of Satellite Art Fair, founded in 2015 by New York artist Brian Andrew Whiteley (he of the Trump tombstone). When I visited the art show on Sunday, the scene was bucolic—the ranch’s buildings housing myriad exhibitions and projects, the sun beaming on a host of outdoor sculptures. Not so, however, in photographer Phil Buehler’s cyclorama.
The indoor installation is a cylindrical plywood structure featuring a panoramic image on its inside. Visitors stepping into the curved space find themselves immersed in a 360-degree view of the remains of an apartment complex in Ukraine after it had been targeted by Russian bombs, courtesy of a high-definition photograph by Buehler. Over the entire scene, an air raid siren plays on loop. It’s a powerful experience, however lo-fi.
“I always feel like these cycloramas are like a transporter,” he told me. “I try to bring things in from someplace else in a different way than other people would. It’s getting a message across in a different way than a writer or a filmmaker or the news would, because art goes into your head a different way.”
Buehler has had a long history of photographing sites equally haunting and haunted. Since 1973, he’s visited the remains of Ellis Island, the Greystone Park psychiatric facility, and New York’s 1964 World’s Fair—documenting what he terms “endangered history.”
His work has also intersected with his activism: he’s photographed the site in Ferguson where Michael Brown was killed, installed a massive mural chronicling U.S. president Donald Trump’s lies, and created a memorial on the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. His cycloramas have captured events from the 2017 Women’s March to a Trump rally. More recently, his mural projects, Empty Beds and Irpin Ukraine: Please Don’t Forget Us, have unpacked the devastation wrought on Ukraine by Russian forces.
His new installation features an image Buehler created in Borodyanka during his first trip to Ukraine, which he took with his wife, the artist Lisa Levy. In the background are variously charred and ruined buildings—some apartments appear abandoned; some have their windows boarded up with wood, signaling that their occupants had returned after the bombing; and others destroyed, their insides exposed to the elements. A children’s toy store is visible in the distance. In the foreground is a field of yellowed grass, amid which a swing set stands askew.
Buehler’s decision to center the panoramic view in the complex’s playground was a conscious one. “I wanted to have some humanity,” he said. “It’s hard to get humanity when there’s nothing inside.”
(Not in frame but close by, Buehler told me, is a wall with a Banksy on it. “It was coming apart. When I was there, there were some Italians who were squirting glue behind the plaster with syringes, so the plaster wouldn’t come off the brick.”)
The artist has titled the cyclorama The Perils of Indifference, a nod to Elie Wiesel’s 1999 speech at the White House. It’s also even more resonant at this moment, as Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its third year, and as Trump, following a disastrous meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, waffles on sending further aid to the embattled nation. “We’re going backwards,” Buehler noted.
It’s why the photographer has opted to work with nonprofits such as Liberty Ukraine, which has backed The Perils of Indifference, in his continued bid to ensure exposure for the ongoing conflict.
“I almost use art as a media provocation,” he explained, telling me about the curiosity that greeted his Ferguson cyclorama when it was installed in Brooklyn. “Art seduces you in a different way. The nature of the cyclorama is that there’s no perspective. You stand in the middle and there’s no framing. You get to choose what you look at.”
After Satellite, Buehler’s plywood cyclorama (the first one he’s hand-built; his other structures were aluminum constructions) will make its way to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There, he will install it with an entirely different image: that of the ward in Greystone Park where the folk legend spent his final years. The picture is plucked from Buehler’s 2013 book Wardy Forty, compiled in partnership with the Woody Guthrie Archives.
That showcase is worlds removed from his Ukraine project, just as his war images are somewhat distinct from his pictures of abandoned sites. But seen together, they’re testament to Buehler’s roving eye and curiosity. Visitors to his cycloramas aren’t the only ones getting immersed.
“These art projects allow me to join groups that otherwise might not necessarily be a natural fit,” he said. “These different worlds are interesting to me. What are they feeling? What are they sharing? There are commonalities: they love their kids and their family, they want their freedom, and they don’t want to be told what to do. The stuff that’s good about America? They want the good stuff.”
Satellite Ranch is on view at 719 Shady Lane, Austin, Texas, through March 15.
