On Montegiovi (2022)
In my artistic practice, I create site-responsive portraits of communities and examine contemporary identity in both physical and digital spaces. My work as an artist strives to illuminate the peculiarities of contemporary culture and to create a record of the historical complexities of the times in which we live.  In August 2022, I was an artist-in-residence in the rural Tuscan village of Montegiovi, Italy. Having made photographs extensively in small towns in the rural United States, I wondered how the context of my practice would shift in a rural community in a new country and culture? Montegiovi currently has 172 residents, down from a peak population of around 1,000 people. I spent my month learning about the history of the village, working collaboratively to make portraits with community members, and documenting the vast and changing landscape.  I wish to gratefully acknowledge Cultivate Projects, Samuele Pii, Madeleine Keller, Joe Giordano, Valentina Peruzzi, Susan Main, and the community of Montegiovi that welcomed me into their lives. The project will be exhibited at the Villa Clara Cultural Center in Montegiovi in 2023.

Centroid Towns (2014 - present)

Centroid Towns is an anthology documentary project studying the twenty-five cities that have been the mean center of population of the United States using photography, oral history interviews, and local archive research. The project puts a face to statistical data, chronicling these towns and their inhabitants to illuminate the ongoing social and political transformation of America. The chapters in the project completed to date examine the environmental impact of overdevelopment, historical legacies of colonial settlers, the changing face of industrial manufacturing, the evolution of American Christianity, economic pressures created by multinational corporations on small business, and civic engagement in small towns. Selections from this project have been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art in Virginia, the Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art in Georgia, and the VHS-Stuttgart Photogallery in Germany.

Centroid Towns (2014 - present)

Centroid Towns is an anthology documentary project studying the twenty-five cities that have been the mean center of population of the United States using photography, oral history interviews, and local archive research. The project puts a face to statistical data, chronicling these towns and their inhabitants to illuminate the ongoing social and political transformation of America. The chapters in the project completed to date examine the environmental impact of overdevelopment, historical legacies of colonial settlers, the changing face of industrial manufacturing, the evolution of American Christianity, economic pressures created by multinational corporations on small business, and civic engagement in small towns. Selections from this project have been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art in Virginia, the Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art in Georgia, and the VHS-Stuttgart Photogallery in Germany.

Larson Shindelman (Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman)
(American, estab. 2007)

#Gratitude (2016 - 2021)
On October 7th, 2011, the blogger and now United Russia Party member Vladimir Burmatov posted a rhyming couplet on Twitter - “Moscow is warm and sunny. Summer! #ThanksToPutinForThat” (VMoskve teplo i solntse. Leto! #spasiboputinuzaeto) - and encouraged others to follow with their own tweets using the hashtag. The invitation was accepted with more than 10,000 tweets that day alone and it became the first globally trending Cyrillic hashtag. The resulting Tweets are frequently sarcastic or critical of Putin’s political agenda.  The tweets identify the tactics of state controlled media apparatus Putin has used to blanket Russia in a single voice of his creation.  This project visualizes the underlying conditions that paved the way for the current war in Ukraine and political quagmire in the US.    For the last seven years, through our collaborative project Geolocation, we have used publicly available embedded GPS information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world.  We photographed sites linked to #ThanksToPutinForThat in St. Petersburg and Moscow during an artist residency and #ThanksObama over the following years in Chicago and Los Angeles.  We began the work for Gratitude in the summer of 2016, on the heels of the US Presidential election, during the fourth year of Vladimir Putin’s “first” term as President of Russia, and two years after invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea.  We completed the book three days before Russia invaded Ukraine (again) on Thursday, February 28, 2022.  Three days later, we received word that our dear friend, translator and writer for this project was able to safely escape Russia.  He now lives as a refugee, along with a quarter of a million Russians who fear for their lives and denounce the atrocities of Putin.  After our time in Russia, we photographed sites linked to #ThanksObama in Chicago and Los Angeles, the sister cities to St. Petersburg and Moscow.  We started this project during the 2016 US presidential election, one that borrowed strategy from Putin’s 2012 Russian presidential campaign, and concluded photographing as the former US President was impeached for the first time by soliciting a sovereign nation to participate in a reelection scheme. The US portion of the project reveals the weaponization of social media in the American political arena, mirroring Putin’s tactics to mobilize the right wing through lies and partial truths. This propaganda push created space for the 45th president to gain dominance through his use of social media and mobilization of White voters through barely-veiled dog whistles. The #ThanksObama hashtag is a precursor to birtherism, white nationalist rallies, installation of far-right extremists on the Supreme Court, racist attacks on immigrants, and an insurrection at the capital.  Our Russian translator, Iaroslav Volovod, a curator at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, writes the afterward, framing the work alongside the current war, his conflicting situation as a citizen of Russia and a refugee, the use of social media as a tool for dissent, and the history of photography.  The completed project illuminates the relationships between world leaders and their constituents, examines the tensions of Russia during Putin’s reign, and analyzes the use of social media as a gathering point for social movement. 

Larson Shindelman (Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman)
(American, estab. 2007)

Geolocation (2009 - 2019)
In the long-term project, Geolocation (2009 - 2019), I work with collaborator Marni Shindelman to repurpose publicly available embedded GPS information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world. Our act of making a photograph anchors and memorializes the ephemeral online data in the real world and also probes the expectations of privacy surrounding social networks. The project also investigates the way that social media has upended the flow of information in contemporary life, from social justice activism to disinformation political campaigns. The project has manifested over 17 site-responsive portraits of communities across the United States, and internationally in England, Canada, Russia, and Qatar.  Selections from the larger project have been recently exhibited at the George Eastman Museum in New York, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in South Carolina, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, and numerous others. Our first monograph Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream was published in 2016 by Flash Powder Press and our second monograph #Gratitude is currently in the design phase.

Commodore Photo Collaborative (2021 - 2022)

In the 2021-2022 academic year, the Commodore Photo Collaborative came together to document the impact of the late-stage COVID-19 pandemic at Commodore John Rodgers in East Baltimore. CJR is a Baltimore City Public School serving grades PreK-8. Aylin Cerezo, Destiny DeChamps, Lola Jones-Carter, and Glori Mahammitt worked with mentor and photographer Nate Larson, borrowing cameras for the year to document the school community. We made photographs both separately and together, and come together weekly to discuss the nature of photographs, composition and technique, as well as what it means to make a portrait of a community. The artist book contains a selection of 32 photographs from the 3,685 photographs made over the course of the academic year. Thank you to the Commodore John Rodgers community for your trust. Special thanks to Michael Rennard, the CJR Gifted & Advanced Learning Coordinator, and the CJR administration for facilitating our collaboration.