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.
Double Take (A Line of Vignettes)
For this project, I created a collage out of light-sensitive paper with a pinhole type of gap in the middle. The collage became another “lens” that I attached to my DSLR camera to scan through tourist merchandise of my native Bulgaria. The ‘light’ spot on each image, reminiscent of a pinhole aesthetic, was the only detectable picture that my camera could capture through the light-sensitive collage. This mechanism for seeing felt simultaneously focused and displaced, leaving an isolated piece of information visible on each photographed commodity.
