Untitled (Spies in the Sky) 2013-Present
Archive Designation: LandAcq3
The following stills are exported from documentaries on aerial surveillance and remade using high speed 35mm film to engage geographic forms of colonialism enacted by military flying machines. Using familiar tropes of the sublime in landscape aesthetics, these images are soaked in film grain and point to archaic forms of surveillance while addressing ideas of beauty in nature. The landscape subject is simultaneously denied and confirmed through fully recognizable ideals of geography and power. Such ideological languages are stabilized through the cultural expectations of their content, while I create conflict by foregrounding their opposites as a way to examine and frustrate aesthetic expectations of these familiar image types.
