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 spiritual 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.
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.