This body of work comes from exchanges with my mother while she was traveling through Scotland and various U.S. national parks. I asked her to send pictures of informational signs, museum placards, and historical markers of where she visited. While I was self-isolating and navigating mental health challenges, these photographs offered a way to experience something together from a distance. This collection became a form of proxy presence: a mediated experience of place and movement that allowed me to participate from a distance in moments I could not physically access.

I have reworked these smartphone images into digital collages. The original text has been reapplied “on top” of the images, maintaining the original insights while shifting their tone as they are layered with textures and partially obscured. The images themselves show signs of AI generation, compression, and digital debris that emerged from the tools I use. These digital details—meticulously edited and collaged—are part of the dislocation: a reminder that what we’re seeing is not the place itself, but a reconstruction filtered through both personal care and technical artifacts. The resulting images float between documentary and speculative space, bearing traces of memory, mediation, and recontextualization.

What interests me about these signs is not only how they designate a place geographically, but how they shape a place conceptually. They say, “Here is history. Here is science. Here is culture,” which becomes the culture itself. As a rhetorical gesture, they officialize a public space and conjure a generalized public. Some of these signs also exist online in searchable databases like The Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org) where one can encounter them entirely outside of their physical environment.

These images reflect on that dislocation and explore what happens when official narratives are decoupled from geography and represented in the now. Their quasifrontality evokes didactic display but they now serve as contemplative objects—quietly questioning how history, authority and place are constructed. These collages invite viewers to consider the fluid boundary between preservation and reinterpretation and how meaning migrates, mutates, and persists in the space between personal experience and shared myth.

This statement was created with assistance from AI tools. For more information on the extent and nature of AI usage, please contact the artist.