Collected Landscapes

Related Tactics
5.25” x 3.5” each
inkjet prints
2022

Collected Landscapes is a set of 51 vintage postcard prints (one from each State and Washington D.C.) by Related Tactics (Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nate Watson) that featured colonial and white supremacist monuments that have been digitally altered to erase those markers, leaving only the ghostly trace of the former presence within view. The seeming tranquility of the remaining landscape image belies the violence not only of the current struggle to dismantle monuments celebrating racist figures, but the processes of colonialism, war, and capitalist expansion that asserted control over these vistas and the people who lived within them. These ‘backdrops’ are themselves part of a scopic regime structuring knowledge and power and serve as a reminder that those systems are in operation whether or not these monuments visibly exist in a community.

Collected Landscapes is part of Memories Breathe and Every Monument Deflates, a body of work in which Related Tactics examines the mechanisms of history-making: framing devices that disseminate and structure stories of place, cities, and value systems, but are often hidden in plain sight, receding into the background in service of the ideologies they enact. We intervene in these tools–including postcards and photographs, statuary plinths, and cartographic processes–to bring them to the fore, invite questions, and make apparent the ways the systems of knowledge they structure undergird our local and national discourses, regardless of whether they are currently present in the landscape.

Exhibition history:
Print Public, Kala Art Institute (2022)