Future Ghosts is a series of constructed photographs that work to make visible the capitalist and colonial logics that produce landscape. The photographs were taken during a road trip after my father's funeral from my hometown in Minnesota to my home in Tijuana, Baja California. This experience back in the landscapes where my great-grandparents homesteaded and put down roots activated a lot of conflicted feelings for me about belonging and not belonging in the Midwest.
The aesthetic forms of landscape painting and photography can erase the processes and transformations that produced this space, in this form, for our pleasure. As landscape studies of the borderlands, my own photography potentially participates in that logic of erasure. My artistic process operates as a way of decolonizing the landscape image to create new habits of seeing. I use the technique of photo weaving to explore the colonial mechanisms of surveying, mapping, and archiving to make them visible in my landscape compositions. My artistic practice raises the question: can we use the same forms of knowledge that make us forget violence--the map, the photograph, the archive, and the bodily experience of a place--to confront and undo it?