What becomes apparent to an observer of the American landscape? What comes into view for the car-bound traveler cresting the interstate overpass, the pedestrian walking along the sidewalk of the subdivision, or the commuter waiting at the bus stop across the street from the strip mall? How can we apprehend our nation through these daily views? And, given the “slipperiness of attention and distraction”—as described by art historian Sally Promey—should we believe what we see?
The American landscape has long served as a canvas for the imagination of its citizens; we shape it to reflect the stories we tell ourselves about this country. The narratives we preserve and reconstruct from the past, recognize in the present, and project into the future are continually contested and renegotiated. Many American stories have been used to justify violence and subjugation, while others have been sources of solidarity, hope, and liberation. We have stories that divide us and stories that bring us together, and these stories are constantly being challenged and reinterpreted. Through my work, I look at how the ongoing argument over what America has been, is now, and should become is inscribed into the landscape itself, a landscape which, despite our attempts to control it, unapologetically tells its own stories about who we are as a people. Undermining narratives of promise and prosperity, the American landscape bears the scars of ecological harm, pollution, and waste. Moreover, as the seasons give rise to cycles of erosion and decay, the it reclaims our monuments, testifying to dreams failed or abandoned.
My work is concerned with questions of American culture and geography as well as questions of American vision. As we regard the American landscape, Promey urges us to consider: “what is available to notice, and why and when and for whom? What entirely eludes the conscious fields of vision and proprioception even though it locates itself squarely within view? . . . What is the impact, furthermore, in an instant and over time, of ‘seeing’ things to which we may not attend? Or of attending to things we think we see, only to discover that we have seen only partially, or have seen what we wished to see?”¹
I am interested both in what we have done to our landscape as well as how we look at it. What do we see and what do we look past due to ignorance, disinterest, fear, shame, or exhaustion?
¹ Sally Promey, Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), 47.