2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast
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print this pagePerforming Vision at the Northern US Border
Saturday, October 24 - 10:00AM to 10:45AM
WCAD 101
In this presentation, I will discuss my years-long project Citizens/Nationals: a series of photographic and performative actions taken at each bridge spanning the northern border of the United States. Begun during the first Trump administration, this work outlines a desire to physically and visually know the hybrid spaces governed by increasingly unpredictable political forces, in the context of a seemingly unasserted boundary. Contrary to more overtly militarized borders, this border often cohabitates with leisure, recreation, and daily life—though it is no less an absolute as any other federal boundary. Added to this complexity is the increasing presence of surveillance apparatus along these sites, further complicating the oscillation between viewership, physical presence, and weaponized observation.
The tension between physical and visual knowledge of place serves as a primary motivation in this work, best explored through film photography and documented performance. The large body of recordings and negatives I produced from my travel along this border are now materializing as increasingly resolute, tangible, installation-based photo-objects, meant to recall the physicality of inhabiting each site. This talk will explore the shifting political conditions taking place during the years of this project, with direct discussion of the capture and creation of these works. Discussions of technique, materiality, and process will be explored as interdependent conditions of the project's conceptual grounding.
The in-camera composites of my series Citizens/Nationals/Visitors/Foreigners/Aliens/Inadmissibles/Subjects emerge out of a desire to refuse the discrete frame of the singular image, and suggest a parallel refusal of the (in)visible boundaries they depict. They visually dissolve each bridge into the sky above it, breaking the 6x7 frame and spreading the image across film. In the installation Operations/Scope/Methodology, I use the simple mechanics of depth of field to visually project the imagination through space, imagining transgressions, and I further this impulse by attempting to physically touch the water-borne boundary at each site in the 17-channel video installation Apprehensions.
Bridge sites offer multiple ways to consider the unique conditions of this border, held in the perceptual ambiguity of bodies of water and with seeming opportunity for transgression. By examining these bridge sites through photographic cataloging, complex in-camera composites rendered on medium-format film, and performative actions captured on video, the work asserts the visual as a primary mode by which experiences at borders are understood and anticipated, while subtle bodily presence acts as witness or transgressor.
Unique to this circumstance along the Northern US is the sometimes minor physical demarcation of the border and lax restriction on movement near it in some areas. At each site, natural geologic barriers execute much of the demarcation, while also performing the role of landscape, exploited resource, recreation site, or tourist trap. As with any border, where bodies are disallowed, sight often continues—and can therefore constitute, along with its seeming proxy photography, primary authorship of a sense of place.
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