Storytelling (2012-13)
Storytelling investigated how landscape painting and imagery function as cultural tools to naturalize resource extraction and national mythmaking. The project focused on the hidden mineral wealth—gold, silver, uranium ore— embedded beneath iconic American landscapes. These resources, violently taken from Indigenous lands, not only shaped the United States’ economic development but also fueled the race to build the atomic bomb and the subsequent nuclear arsenal.
To explore this dual register of beauty and violence, I created a series of works that paired painted color charts— derived from the palettes of picturesque landscape paintings—with draped “ribbons” that linked them. Each ribbon was a collage: one side reproduced a fragment of a U.S. Geological Survey map corresponding to the depicted site, while the reverse was made of vellum in metallic tones (silver, gold, yellow-green) signaling the minerals buried below. These ribbons acted as visual clues, revealing what the landscape images themselves occluded.
The source material for the paintings came from outdated encyclopedias, National Geographic, and Reader’s Digest books—mass media that served as vehicles of state-sanctioned narratives and propaganda. Displayed alongside the works, these publications underscored how representations of the American West were instrumental in promoting the ideology of manifest destiny while concealing the extractive violence beneath the land’s surface.
In Storytelling, landscape becomes a contested surface: simultaneously a site of beauty, a tool of myth-making, and a screen that hides histories of dispossession and extraction.