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Tethered, Proposed Formosa Plastics Plant in St. James Parish, LA and Sugar Cane Weaving, Digital Composite Photograph, 2021, 20x30”
Tethered, Ussher Fort, Accra, Ghana and Batik Rope, Digital Composite Photograph, 2021, 20x30”
Tethered is an ongoing digital composite photo series that combines photographs of contested or politically fraught landscapes with scans of textiles produced from materials sourced in the same location. The series rejects the presumed neutrality of landscape-based works and instead visualizes the emotional and physical charge that is embedded in these sites of protest, education, violence, and resilience. As such, the works reference double exposure photography as a metaphor for how the land indicates the echoes of these past and current moments of joy, struggle, coalition building, and daily life. Specifically, Tethered aims to acknowledge how the land and water are conduits for accessing the past in the present and offers the opportunity for future healing and knowledge by accessing this connection. The project considers how land is borderless, is a passing moment of condition, a fluctuating ecosystem, and a monument to all that it has experienced. Lastly, the textures of tilled soil and choppy waves like the knots in rope or overlapping in weaving represented in these photographs are larger indicators of how our collective history, culture, and societal structures are informed by the larger continuum of our global history, specifically that of the rippling effects of European colonization, African enslavement, and Indigenous displacement and genocide.
Tethered, Container, Side and Surface, 603 Randolph Ave. and First National Bank of Huntsville, 2022, 16x20,” Large-format Double Exposures made in collaboration with Josh Hastings, Silver Gelatin Print produced by Jim Bishop
This image is the combination of two images the first taken of First National Bank (1835-36) and the second of Hastings’ parent's former home, 603 Randolph Avenue (1832-37), in Huntsville, AL. Both sites represent significant local architecture and are also credited to well-known architect George Steele despite being built by the enslaved.