"Michael Ashkin works across a range of media--painting, photography, sculpture, video, and text. Uniting these diverse practices is a conceptual focus on the way that notions of space and place, landscape and self, are shaped by wider political and economic forces. "Were it not for" is combining a 670-line text with 218 photographs of the Mojave Desert. This combination creates a powerful sense of unease throughout the document, which is exploring the idea of fear and haunting as an effect of the violent legacies contained within the landscape, and as a function of the technologies that we use to represent it"--