Dreaming on the Hudson

“Dreaming on the Hudson” imagines staged figures in the natural world, specifically the Hudson River Valley, who author a new cultural citizenship and rebel against American imaginations of masculinity and stewardship. The subjects’ connection to the Hudson - America’s first iconic landscape - serves to reclaim, and thereby contest, the history of land ownership and power and ultimately their stake in the American pastoral. Inspired by the Hudson River School’s romanticized paintings of the river valley, I recontextualize the relationship between nature and belonging, identity and masculinity, and history and erasure.