Monument
Stone Mountain Park is a Georgia State park, within the city of Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta. The carving on the side of the mile-high granite rock is the largest Confederate Monument in the world and is a legally protected memorial to the Confederacy, written into Georgia State code. While the carving began in the early 20th century by the Daughters of the Confederacy, it stalled and sat idle for decades. The carving, and the inauguration of the memorial to the Confederacy, resumed in the 1960s as a response to the Civil Rights Era. It was completed in 1972.
In this work, I photograph the landscape and details of Stone Mountain Park to explore the construction of white supremacy and how the ideology of white superiority will always remain unfinished, damaged, and incomplete. Against the backdrop of the geological history of Stone Mountain, itself an earthly monument, the Lost Cause narrative and the fantasy of white superiority is pitiful. The land can never uplift these fictions. As such, this work explores how the natural world will eventually correct what humans cannot.