How do the physical remains of a prior situation perform its politics in our present social spaces? Ironically, through the entertaining act of tourism we approach the most intensely somber moments of our pasts. In Till Death Do Us Part, photography and writing are employed to investigate nostalgia and tourism at sites where national identities are exhibited. The exhibition Till Death Do Us Part presents large-scale photographs derived from the artist’s interactions with ‘monuments’, both public and private. This interdisciplinary project was produced in Philadelphia: the origin of the Declaration of Independence and the political birthplace of the American Revolution. The artist grew up in Mississippi, a state marked by an ever-present tension when commemorating or disparaging its complicated history. Extensive time spent in European and colonial cities such as Berlin, Rome and Johannesburg has broadened her thinking on the expansiveness of western modes of monumentalizing history. The work speaks to the intersection of social history and phenomenological experience at play in personal identifications with specific places.
“Over the past two years I have revisited sites and situations that play a permanent role in my identity as an American—even if I feel ambivalent or even appalled by them. Using photography as a method to create portable memorials, I am able to re-locate and re-contextualize these instances of politically-charged visual culture into a single exhibition where the pressures and perspectives of complex histories compete in one room for attention and allegiance, as they do in my life.”
