Double Take (The Mountain Before the Monument)
This wall installation of 1215 surveillance photographs of Mt. Rushmore is part of a larger project titled “The Mountain Before the Monument”, which considers the entanglements of nationhood, land, and civic pride. For the wall installation, I used images from Earth Cam taken between 2016 and 2019 and printed in the standard family format of 4"x 6". I vetted my selection based on the least iconic depictions in terms of cropping, lighting, and weather conditions. This grouping gives a different aura to the memorial as it makes the very familiar image of Mt. Rushmore into a multitude of offbeat representations. By highlighting what is odd about the surveillance camera footage, I am thinking about nation-building as a layered and complex process with multiple histories.
