my America, 2023, 156x120x6 inches, Metal studs, Souvenir magnets, found advertising stickers, defiant motion sensor security lights
A metal-studded gate. Behind it, hundreds of souvenir magnets—stacked, crowded, pressing into excess. They depict places meant to feel vast: a national park, a mountain range, a canyon, a skyline. Here, each is flattened into enamel and gloss, reduced to something that fits in a palm and sells for three dollars. The souvenir promises memory. It says: I was here. This place was real. But what, exactly, is being remembered? Many of these landscapes carry histories that exceed the frame—of Indigenous presence, of removal, of contested ground that long predates their transformation into destinations. None of that adheres to the surface. What the magnet holds instead is a version: compressed, polished, made legible at a glance. In this sense, commemoration becomes a form of editing. Not an act of preserving the past, but of narrowing it—until it can be carried away without friction. Inside, accumulation overwhelms attention. No single magnet asks to be looked at for long. It is the density that matters, the repetition. Image against image, place against place, difference dissolves into pattern. Meaning is not held in any one object, but produced through their relentless sameness. The gate does not simply contain these objects; it organizes them into a field where authenticity and fabrication are no longer opposites but conditions of the same surface. What appears as memory begins to resemble inventory. And in that shift, commemoration reveals its other function—not to preserve what was, but to make forgetting scalable.
