You Speak English Too Well (An Ode to My Daughter)
You Speak English Too Well brings together early childhood scribbles with surveillance camera close-ups of Mt. Rushmore to re-imagine nationhood as something that is not yet learned but in the process of becoming so. I think of copying children’s scribbles as a generative act that embodies a new consciousness and an act of resistance to what has already been internalized. The shapes of mountains in the paintings are based on surveillance camera footage of Mt. Rushmore when the camera displaces the figures of the presidents to randomly capture the edges of the mountain. Referencing Mt. Rushmore as only rocks and sky reminds us it was once a landscape not yet inscribed by a national ethos. Pairing these seemingly unrelated subjects together creates a space, both material and figurative, in which we can ruminate on the influence of a powerful symbol of national capital against a child’s developing awareness of self.
