my America, 2023, 156x120x6 inches, Metal studs, Souvenir magnets, found advertising stickers, defiant motion sensor security lights
A metal-studded gate holds hundreds of souvenir magnets—vast landscapes reduced to palm-sized gloss. In this reduction, the work dismantles the idol of America into an everyday commodity. The sublime scale of nature, along with the histories embedded within it—Indigenous displacement, territorial violence, contested ownership—is compressed into a slick collectible surface. The souvenir offers the illusion of possession while severing the consumer from any ethical relation to history. Though it claims memory, the magnet retains only a polished, frictionless version of the past. Here, commemoration operates as a form of editing. As image stacks against image, difference collapses into repetition, and memory begins to resemble inventory. Accumulation reveals commemoration’s latent function: not to preserve what was, but to make forgetting effortless.
