I am an artist and researcher seeking to unsettle my foundational assumptions about the natural world and my place within it. I connect these assumptions to ideologies about the supposed naturalness of human exceptionalism, masculinity, white supremacy, and capitalism–the foundations of U.S. culture. This work emerges as an entanglement of installation, performance, video, sculpture, text, and digital collage. My research is slow, embodied, and place-based, emphasizing the time and attention it takes to develop a lasting, visceral understanding of something. Through my work I want others to come away with an open, ongoing, multisensorial curiosity about themself and the multiplicitous world that are submerged within.
I am an eighth-generation Utahn, a Danish-British-Scottish-Welsh-U.S. American, and a child of Mormons. In the mid-1800's, after repeatedly being forced out of their homes in New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, my ancestors migrated across the Great Plains into the Great Basin. They then forced the Indigenous inhabitants between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas off of their ancestral hunting grounds, farming lands, and fishing waters. Over a hundred years later, I was raised near Navajo sandstone cliffs, the Virgin River, and the Pine Valley mountains in Nuwu (Southern Paiute) territory. After leaving Mormonism, this land is where I reformed my spirituality. I am in love with someone else's homeland.
As I reckon with this personal and ancestral history, I must also reckon with an inherited ideological history. The Book of Mormon is said to be a record of ancient Christians in the Americas and claims that contemporary Indigenous peoples are among the descendants of a people cursed by God. Further, this book promises that when Indigenous peoples accept the Book of Mormon as their own history, they will become a pure/White people. This settler-colonial violence has become central to my work at the intersections of Mormonism, Whiteness, and American-ness.
I am an eighth-generation Utahn, a Danish-British-Scottish-Welsh-U.S. American, and a child of Mormons. In the mid-1800's, after repeatedly being forced out of their homes in New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, my ancestors migrated across the Great Plains into the Great Basin. They then forced the Indigenous inhabitants between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas off of their ancestral hunting grounds, farming lands, and fishing waters. Over a hundred years later, I was raised near Navajo sandstone cliffs, the Virgin River, and the Pine Valley mountains in Nuwu (Southern Paiute) territory. After leaving Mormonism, this land is where I reformed my spirituality. I am in love with someone else's homeland.
As I reckon with this personal and ancestral history, I must also reckon with an inherited ideological history. The Book of Mormon is said to be a record of ancient Christians in the Americas and claims that contemporary Indigenous peoples are among the descendants of a people cursed by God. Further, this book promises that when Indigenous peoples accept the Book of Mormon as their own history, they will become a pure/White people. This settler-colonial violence has become central to my work at the intersections of Mormonism, Whiteness, and American-ness.
