Our Land Your Imagination: The Judeo-Christian Western Scientific Worldview and Phoenix is featured in the exhibition Outsiders Within: Contemporary Work from Regional Latino/a and Native American Artists at the Tempe Center for the Arts. The exhibition is on display April 25 - July 3, 2009.
Our Land Your Imagination: The Judeo-Christian Western Scientific Worldview and Phoenix, 2008
Two-channel video installation, with sound. Running time: 12:32.
Our Land Your Imagination is a series of multi-channel video installations that examine the impact of the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View on the landscapes of America and the Western Hemisphere. The series of work is comprised of reappropriated and re-contextualized Youtube videos submitted by users who live within the particular community or region featured in the installation. My goal is to create site-specific video installations that reveal the complexity of interactions between the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View and Indigenous land. I want to create environments where audiences are engaged by multiple narratives of moving images, voices, music and sounds that tell a story about a story of which we are all participants.
“The Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View and Phoenix” is a two channel video installation comprised of 10 Youtube videos. Each channel contains five looped videos projected onto cornering walls. One of the channels features anonymous women singing karaoke versions of Carpenters songs about love and loss, hope and failure, and dreams unrealized. They are the muses and voices of the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View. The singers are juxtaposed against videos of suburban Phoenix: a construction site near a dairy farm in south Chandler; an empty house for sale in Buckeye resulting from foreclosure; a hot air balloon crashing down on an Anthem subdivision; a dust storm viewed from within the cinder block walls of a tract house property in Maricopa; and a set of palm trees in a Mesa backyard blowing in the wind — entirely non-Indigenous and ubiquitous. Audiences are confronted with internal and external landscapes altered by the Judeo-Christian Western Scientific World View. The installation provides an unfiltered vision of damaged, monotonous, lonely, and tragically beautiful visions of suburban Phoenix through the surprisingly intimate and revealing lens of the Phoenix suburban community itself.
