was, as we know, history is a photography and audio installation that looks at miniature replicas of culturally-significant sites as allegorical of the fallibility of historical memory. The work explores how sites of natural wonder, war, collective trauma, and buildings erected through exploitation can become reduced, displaced, commodified, and souvenired through representation. Each image is paired with a soundtrack accessed through an audio guide. The soundtrack collages texts by Stuart Hall, Michel de Certeau, and Susan Stewart with history textbooks, travel guides, and ambient sounds. As one listens, the tone, content, and narrator continually shift. The overarching narrative becomes abstract, nonlinear, and often contradictory. The viewer is encouraged to synthesize their own narrative and to question the systems in which institutional knowledge is constructed and conveyed.
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was, as we know, history, 2016, archival inkjet photographs mounted to museum boxes with audio guides, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, NY
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Lower Manhattan from was, as we know, history, 2016, archival inkjet print, 20 x 30”, exhibited with audio guide
