Lisi Raskin’s Switchyard, is a large-scale installation comprised of drawings that span the entire gallery. From the street, viewers are beckoned by “Trench,” a window installation in which orange light glows through collages of an ominous sky that lurks behind silhouetted barbed wire and debris. Inside, drawings are nested within a framework of altered architecture and bathed in hues of dusky light.

Like much of her work, Switchyard represents Raskin’s interest in exploring psychological states through the physical use and transformation of materials. This process is aided and abetted by the formation of fictional characters, narratives, and landscapes.

Switchyard was inspired by the artist’s recent experience of trespassing at a railway yard in Asheville, North Carolina, where, in an apparent breach of homeland security, she was approached by police and issued a citation. In creating the installation, Raskin surrounded herself with photos she took on that day in the railyard and images she culled from a vintage copy of “Operation Cue,” a government-issue pamphlet detailing the 1955 Atomic Energy Commission test detonation of a nuclear device that intentionally destroyed an entire “dummy” town; she utilized paper, graphite, X-Acto knives, and glue to conjure and shape a post-event landscape. Raskin used her own bodily force to approximate destruction and violence.