Model Citizens Exhibition
"un véritable tour de force" — Process Magazine
How do staging, performance, and roleplay inform thinking about citizenship in a violent land whose people no longer agree on what is true? What stories are we told, what games do we play, to manage unsettling truths?
Juxtaposing images from seemingly unrelated sites—military training scenarios, the US Border Patrol Academy, political rallies, historical museums, and Hollywood movies—this multimedia installation illuminates systems that reconcile, justify, or distract from the realities of life in a polarized, militarized society. An American case study of a global phenomenon, Model Citizens questions the role of documentary in the "post-truth" era and challenges viewers to question what they see.
Curated by Photo Elysée Director Nathalie Herschdorfer and Lydia Dorner, Model Citizens premiered as a featured exhibition at the 2024 Rencontres d'Arles (France) and next showed at Fotofestiwal Łódź (Poland), in 2025. Installation views here. The exhibition includes work from two projects, Model Citizens and Necessary Fictions, as well as the genre-defying experimental found-footage short, Pineland/Hollywood:
64 color photographs, including 56 framed prints and eight wallpaper images, plus one projection with sound, in English with local-language subtitles.
Model Citizens was realized under the aegis of the 5th cycle of the Prix Elysée, a biennial juried contemporary photography award created by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland with the support of Parmigiani Fleurier. Support for Necessary Fictions from a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, a Leica Women Foto Project Award, a Speranza Foundation Lincoln City Fellowship, the Harpo Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, a Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation. Fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).