Filmed in the Anza-Borrego Desert and Salton Sea in Southern California, Desert Wash is a 3-channel video installation which combines images of desert landscapes, modernist architecture, and performances by Rotunda Collective (Yasmine Benabdallah and Nena Hedrick). An encounter with the Borrego Springs Desert Club, now functioning as the University of California Steele/Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center, explores property, land use, and settler colonial illusion of wild and empty desert. The artists’ bodies enter into conversation with modernist architecture to re-emerge histories and projections of control and temporalities in tension. The images and sound are referential of movies filmed in the Anza-Borrego desert, often to signify deserts elsewhere, reflecting cinema’s historical production of an iconography of the desert as narrative backdrop. Spatialized sound washes over the visitors as they’re invited to watch the images on 3 floating screens arranged in a semi-hexagonal shape in the center of the room. Amphitheater-like rows of seats are set back on either side of the screens.