Fertile Mesilla Valley (Las Cruces, NM) (Copy)

Heart of the Navajo Indian Country (Gallup, NM) (Copy)

"As Behind Many a Rock, a Blood-thirsty Savage Lurked" (Cimarron Canyon, NM) (Copy)

Road to the Hill (Los Alamos, NM) (Copy)

The “Enchanted Ranch” in the Land of Enchantment, (Santa Fe, NM) (Copy)

Presenting: A Colorful View (Bingham Canyon Mine, UT) (Copy)

High Above the Colorado River (Dead Horse Point, UT) (Copy)

"A Navajo chieftain and his squaw" ( Monument Valley, AZ) (Copy)

Boating on Lake Powell (Twilight Canyon, UT) (Copy)

Man's Greatest Engineering Achievement (Lake Mead, AZ) (Copy)

Lands of Enchantment, challenges the glossy, picturesque, Kodachrome mirages of colonialist America. The form was inspired by a vintage postcard diorama I found in a local shop. I was captivated that someone took the time to create such an homage to a place they had been. Postcards, I thought, are the talismans of tourism. They memorialize one’s experience in a place, they idealize the place itself. But what if they revealed truths?

In these dioramas, idyllic postcard imagery is obscured by truths: black text listing the indigenous tribes who have stewardship over the land and red text revealing an unspoken truth about the condition of that land.

Looking Upstream (Glen Canyon Dam) (Copy) (Copy)

Our Vested Heritage (Mt. Rushmore) (Copy) (Copy)

Titan of Chasms (Grand Canyon) (Copy) (Copy)

Series II
These large-scale iterations of the series were created in 2021 with support from a MAKE grant from Regional Arts and Culture Council. The postcards for Series II have been magnified to amplify the dispatch, like billboards on driven thoroughfares. At this scale, the postcard images begin to dissolve into to their constituent dots, revealing their faded hues and worn out treatises of so-called excellence.

All photos by Mario Gallucci.
Lists of indigenous names provided from nativeland.ca