projections
shall be like a tree planted by waters, sending forth its roots by a stream (2024)
Goat Farm SITE Festival + Atlanta Art Week 2024
The Goat Farm Art Center commissioned me to digitally "flood" the historic 1889 tunnel under The Goat Farm, likely the oldest tunnel in Atlanta. A stream fed by Peachtree Creek flows under this site, although few stop to think about the "spring" in the Spring Road that runs through the property. As visitors walk through this projection-mapped tunnel, they heard a live audio feed from the roaring rapids of the nearby water intake point at Standing Peachtree where the City of Atlanta takes all of its drinking water, much of which is then piped to the historic reservoir next door to the Goat Farm, in addition to flowing naturally to the spring below the site. The title "shall be like a tree planted by waters, sending forth its roots by a stream (2024)" is from Jeremiah 17:8, asking visitors to consider the metaphor of water as a precious resource that cannot be taken for granted. These hidden springs can be seen as a buried map tracing the interconnectedness of all of us.
ponce de leon time machine (2025)
Site-specific single-channel video, duration 08:30
A short film by Joel Silverman (2025)
If the windows of 725 Ponce de Leon Ave in Atlanta, site of the 2025 Off the Wall: NEW DIRECTIONS group show, were replaced by a magic time portal, one might stand on the Beltline and look back 100 years to see the Spiller Park baseball field where the Whole Foods is today. Or you could look back 150 years to see the Ponce de Leon Springs park where Atlantans flocked for the miracle cure of “healing waters” that still flow buried beneath this site. Or you might look back further still to the forever-before when the city was still a forest, unclaimed by settlement. This site-specific experimental short film presents two narrators in silhouette (both played by me). One of these Joels is fact-minded and the other Joel is prone to grandiose mythogeography, weaving together in increasingly absurd and surreal fashion tall tales and urban legends about Atlanta's most storied street, Ponce de Leon Avenue. Many of these stories are true, and some are too-good-to-be-true. I wrote the script inspired in equal parts by Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Wise Men of Chelm and Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, declaiming in increasingly absurd and exaggerated fashion the tall tales and urban legends about this site in an attempt to explore the ways a city builds identity through the stories we tell about ourselves.
birth of which nation (2024)
birth of which nation (2024), one channel projection on granite (sped up excerpt), 193 minutes
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation premiered in nearby Atlanta the week after the modern Ku Klux Klan was born at the summit of Stone Mountain with the midnight burning of a sixteen foot cross on Thanksgiving Eve, 1915. The Birth of a Nation was the first Hollywood blockbuster and was a racist tour de force, celebrating the rise of the Klan as a counter to Emancipation and Reconstruction. Within months, the Klan commissioned the infamous 90 foot tall Stone Mountain carving of Civil War heroes as part of a marketing campaign that soon grew their hooded ranks to 4,000,000 members. In the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, 110 Confederate monuments have been removed from public squares, but the Stone Mountain monument remains, by design too massive to remove.
For decades, Confederate-themed laser shows and cartoons have been projected onto this granite screen. I hatched a plan to project the film directly onto the granite of the mountain as an indictment of this history. I recruited some helpers and we hid out after the park closed, waiting until dark. We set up a battery-powered projector, and screened Birth of a Nation onto Stone Mountain itself.