Monument

Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration.

Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re-calibration are explored through form and content and the distinct features of the media employed.

Presidents Park was once a ten-acre sculpture park (originally located in Williamsburg, VA) that contained 18- to 20-ft tall white busts of 42 U.S. presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush. The park was foreclosed in 2010 due to financial troubles and the busts were relocated to nearby Croaker, where the crumbling statues still sit, abandoned in an overgrown acreage.

Marcus-David Peters was a Virginia man who was shot and killed by police officer Michael Nyantakyi on May 14, 2018, while Peters, unarmed, was having a mental health crisis. In 2020, during the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, Peters’s death was a major focus of local Virginia protests. That summer in Richmond, Virginia, the greenspace surrounding the approximately 60-ft tall Robert E. Lee statue (one of several Confederate monuments along the city’s Monument Avenue) became a vibrant community gathering space. Over several weeks, the statue of Robert E. Lee was reclaimed by protesters and activists and neighbors who collectively transformed it into a living monument. It became a public work of art, a mutual aid center, a place for kids to shoot hoops, a memorial to people who were killed by police, and a space for communal organization and celebration symbolizing positive change and transformation. The circle that held the statue, and this blossoming community vision, was renamed Marcus-David Peters Circle in his honor. That year, The New York Times named the Robert E. Lee monument — in its revised state — as the most influential form of American protest art since World War II. The site of this monument has since been leveled and transformed into an unnamed, non-pedestrian garden.