Take Nothing But Pictures, Leave Nothing But Footprints, 2026
mixed media, locally sourced materials

Both works are built from what people throw onto the land: trash pulled from nearby rivers and roadsides, fabric scraps, and materials donated by community members. From that waste, A rebuilds a stolen paradise and the graves it left behind. Take Nothing but Pictures, Leave Nothing but Footprints was meant as a gentle instruction for visitors. On this land, it reads as an indictment.

Take Nothing But Pictures

Take Nothing But Pictures is assembled from the waste discarded onto the land it depicts. From that garbage, A rebuilds the kind of scene classic American landscape painting loved — the idyllic view of the West, resting “Indians” nestled between rivers and mountains, posed like part of the scenery. Many of these paintings sold the frontier to White settlers as pristine, abundant, and empty of any claim but their own- Manifest Destiny rendered by way of art. A beautiful advertisement for a taking.

A rebuilds that beauty out of garbage on purpose. To romanticize this land is to litter it-  first with a fantasy, and then with everything the fantasy justified. 

Leave Nothing But Footprints

Leave Nothing But Footprints is made from the same process of discarded material as its companion, along with twigs and birch bark gathered from the riverside, and it shows what the first picture leaves out: a winter landscape, and unmarked graves in the snow.

The scene comes from a visit A took to their traditional homeland in Michigan. A citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians, A presents graves that are not only their own peoples. They belong to the people of Turtle Island: those cleared to make room for the paradise these American artists painted, the children who never came home, the names no one was allowed to mark.

That the graves are built partly from wiigwaas, birch bark, a material their ancestors used for canoes, scrolls, and shelter, is deliberate: the land tends to its own. Leave Nothing but Footprints was meant as a gentle instruction. Here it becomes a sentence. The footprints left on this land were not gentle, and what remains beneath the snow is the cost of a beautiful lie.