2017—2023
RESEARCH
Through a study of two series of landscape photographs by twenty-first century American artists, I proposes a theory of “anti-assimilationist landscape”: a politicized rejection of the pictorial conventions of landscape and the systems of land ownership, gender, and nation-building they sustain. Collier Schorr and David Benjamin Sherry make landscape images in sites with histories of gendered settler-colonial and white supremacist violence. I argue that their works function as both interpretation of those sites and a queer reclamation of them, enacting a politics beyond the liberal-democratic notion of citizenship and the fascist notion of ‘blood and soil.’ Arguing for its applicability to landscape architecture theory and practice, I contrast this anti-assimilationist mode to the turn-of-the-millennium concept of ‘eco-revelation,’ proposing instead a queer aesthetics of obscuring and the potential of ‘becoming illegible’ as an environmentalist practice.
You can read the article in Journal of Landscape Architecture: “Anti-Assimilationist Landscape: Becoming Illegible as Queer Resistance to State Power.
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