Coinciding with this solo exhibition is the featuring of Barden’s large digitally manipulated work View from the Seventh Street Bridge in the inaugural exhibition at the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, opening to the public on May 6.

This Was The Landscape of Our Innocence is presented in two symmetrical installations: Our Yosemite and My Blue Ridge, each consisting of a nine-panel grid in hand-crafted hardwood frames, eight “Posters” and two text panels. The text panels are narrative accounts Barden composed, pairing the violent forced removal of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma with the brutal ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the forced removal of the Paiute Indians from Yosemite Valley with the barbaric, pointless invasion of Iraq. 

Barden’s My Blue Ridge text opens with the artist’s confession that the Blue Ridge home of his youth provided a sense of American innocence that was soon proven to be false. It was also where Barden became an itinerant finish carpenter, a craft he returned to in a woodshop on San Fernando Road where he designed and milled the frames for the grids in American hardwoods, with pin-striped inlays in blue and red epoxy.

This 58-piece photo-based conceptual work explores the poetic resonance between the mythic democratic American landscape, our colonial aggression here and abroad, and our commitment to endless war. The show also introduces The SuitMasters, a series of 12 digitally manipulated surrogate figures who, dressed in suits, “perform authority, without accountability”, and a suite of eight composited images entitled War in Yosemite, a satire on our obsession with armaments and war.