Thesis Exhibition: April 16 - 19, 2014

Opening Reception: Friday, April 18, 6 - 8:30pm

How do the physical remains of a prior situation perform its politics in our present social spaces? Ironically, through the entertaining act of tourism we approach the most intensely somber moments of our pasts. Through photography and writing I investigate nostalgia and tourism at sites where national identities are exhibited. My interdisciplinary practice is based in Philadelphia: the origin of the Declaration of  Independence and the political birthplace of the American Revolution. I grew up in Mississippi, a state marked by an ever-present tension when commemorating or disparaging its complicated history. Extensive time spent in European and colonial cities such as Berlin, Rome and Johannesburg has broadened my thinking on the expansiveness of western modes of monumentalizing history. My work speaks to the intersection of social history and phenomenological experience at play in personal identifications with specific places. 

The exhibition Till Death Do Us Part presents large-scale photographs derived from my interactions with ‘monuments’, both public and private. Over the past two years I have revisited sites and situations that play a permanent role in my identity as an American—even if I feel ambivalent or even appalled by them. Using photography as a method to create portable memorials, I am able to re-locate and re-contextualize these instances of politically-charged visual culture into a single exhibition where the pressures and perspectives of complex histories compete in one room for attention and allegiance, as they do in my life. Coinciding, screenings of the multi-channel video work Anniversary will take place at The Icebox Project Space at 1400 N. American Street.

Cold War Reversal: All Smiles with the Newly Anti-Capitalist Berlin Wall.
2014
Archival Inkjet
27 x 18 in.

For the Glory
2014
Archival Inkjet
40 x 60 in.