The North-American west is a place of beauty, exploration, mystery, adventure, and all kinds of stories you could imagine; at least that’s what we’re told. As Above, So Below explores the fading, dated myth of the American Dream and the idea of the wild west. The ideal for people in Canada and the States has always been one built on the back of land; land that we can use to realize our limitless ideas, but that needs to be tamed and shaped to our will. However, the story of this history of land grabs has been, in principle, just that: a series of hostile land grabs and trade acquisitions to repossess the land from the people who were living on it long before the first Europeans landed on its shores. 

 

Through faux-historical images, the project reframes the idea of the untamed, wild west of the past into a modern narrative and invites the viewer to envision the land they know in the present as something for some future people to come categorize and steal from them. 

 

Simultaneously, as a black artist creating work about a white myth while still living on this stolen land, the project forces the question of whether we, as people of colour, can truly create and have space forourselves, or if by being forcefully, or coerced from the need for success in the capitalist system, that we perpetuate the harmful cycle of theft, and thus seal off the path forward to a more fair society.