The Elephant, 2011
The title refers to an antiquated expression (“Seeing the Elephant”) used to describe the thrill and despair experienced during the California Gold Rush. In this series, I playfully examine three sites on which the Californian Dream is simultaneously projected, elided, and reconstituted. The photographic installation alludes to the fantasies and failures manifest in the 1984 film Poltergeist, a 1966 episode of Star Trek and the aspirational mythologies of the Gold Rush. Here, the real and the fictional slip into each other, intertwining, becoming endless cycles of hope and disappointment, the past forever haunting.
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