Metaphorical Microcosmoses
Terran Last Gun
Voyager Messages
September 19–October 24, 2026
McClain Gallery
By Lauren Klotzman
Terran Last Gun’s Voyager Messages at McClain Gallery is a rare jolt of positivity contra the dire burdens of our data-driven age. Working within the tradition of ledger painting, Last Gun’s historically rooted acts of ‘remix’ infused hope in the fact of data’s ultimate decay in the face of time and the inevitable constant of entropy.
Our contemporary moment is highly defined by data: inventorying, tracking, quantifying, and documenting the twin threads of resources/stuff and worth/money has come to feel part of a taxing administrative necessity specific to our late capitalist dystopia. We forget—however—that this behavior is age old stuff: some of our earliest examples of writing are inventories, ledgers, and other items of business, to the degree that cuneiform has become memeable source material (see the infamous Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir c. 1750 BC).
Last Gun’s substrates are not nearly as old—most date from the 1920s—but the handwritten cursive script numbers contained within them feel just as archaic and weathered as any stone tablet might to Gen Z and younger. The content of these ledgers longs for deaccession from preservation, to be treated as obsolete waste that no longer has dictum over the course of history; not to mention the fact that they are practically illegible to the general populace as a result of their form…
Of course, since about the late 19th century, these old-fashioned ‘Excel spreadsheets’ have served a purpose beyond data when, as the typical resource for Indigenous painting—Buffalo hide—dwindled due to US Government eradication programs, and artists of the Plains tribes turned to the paper, supplies, and techniques of the incursionary missionary, military, and civilian trader groups of European origin.
Terran Last Gun works within this tradition, creating transformations of data which not only respect the historicity and form of the object (in all its simultaneous practicality and oppressiveness), but also to breathe optimism, hope, and renewal into it: this sheet of paper can exist beyond its use-value and be more than an accounting tool. And in so doing (remixing), the sheet is liberated from its limitations while retaining its past as a residue.
As ledger painting, Last Gun’s works are distinctive on many levels, not limited to their commitment to non-pictorial, post-minimalist geometric abstraction. At McClain, the simple beauty of the abstractions is heightened by the layout of the exhibition’s installation: the entire body of work reads left to right and as a horizon punctuated by triptychs featuring circular forms; as if the sun and the moon were present on the metaphorical earth microcosm within the gallery.
Notable also is Last Gun’s use of concentric circles to represent the Blackfeet trinity… but I can’t help reading these overlapping circles as a kind of target drawn upon the complicated history of administrative burden that these substrates represent, as if to say: shoot here. In contrast to this more aggressive/pessimistic read, the trapezoid forms on display—particularly when read as if the installation were a book (left to right)—feel as if the horizon was opening up, infusing my heart with some of that aforementioned optimism, with a distinctive, familiar desert tone that I find comforting.
In the datasphere of our contemporary moment, I do feel optimistic when I view Last Gun’s works, especially in light of the emergent scholarly discourse from historians such as D. Graham Burnett and burgeoning institutions such as the School for Radical Attention, which speak beyond the ‘attention economy’ and toward ‘human fracking.’ It makes me curious about the future of a more digital form of ledger painting… but for now, Last Gun’s works show me that the oppressive nature of data in 2026 can be fought in simple, core ways: it can be as simple as drawing a sacred triad resembling a target that acts as a sigil. ■
The Houston Associated Experimental Press, Volume 01, Issue 03, page 13
