2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageNo place but here
Student Presentation
Friday, October 10 - 5:00PM to 5:15PM
IPE Building
No place but here is an ongoing investigation that uses collage, performance, and constructed photographs to interrogate familial and broader narratives of power, control, and whiteness in the American West. Intersecting questions of ambiguity, artifice, legibility, and queerness, the work centers on sites now known as California's Colorado Desert and the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming—lands marked by extraction and concealment.
The project draws from both personal and cultural inheritances, exploring how histories of land use and western mythologies overlap with fractured family relationships. Photography becomes a way to reach back, to sift through cycles of inheritance, foreclosed histories, and grief. Archival materials are reproduced, cut, and layered into ephemeral collages and tableaux, fixed through the camera's lens.
Sourcing imagery from family albums, Craigslist posts, national park databases, instructional guides, and even discarded porn magazines, the work blends the personal with the collective. Familiar western motifs—game animals, jackalopes, rattlesnakes, untouched wilderness—are reconfigured to both seduce and unsettle, revealing the contradictions embedded in cultural memory.
Ultimately, No place but here opens a generative space for alternative mythologies, where collages, montages, and photographs serve as vessels for the absurdity, estrangement, and resilience left in the wake of grief.
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