Jaws
“God has his agents… the angels execute God’s will. They can even influence the affairs of great nations.”
This video takes that claim as a starting point, listening to Billy Graham’s 1975 Texas Tech sermon as an early script for how spiritual authority, moral panic, and national destiny get braided together. Heard in the present, his words echo through the ideology of white Christian nationalism, where invisible forces are imagined as steering both lives and land.
The work layers Graham’s voice over long, slow shots of Big Bend National Park, a landscape often framed as pristine, sacred, and in need of protection, alongside the image of a snake killed on the roadside within the park. This framing unsettles familiar myths of wilderness as untouched or redemptive, making visible how ecological harm and everyday violence persist inside spaces marked as “natural” or “preserved.”
Drawing from ecofeminist and ecological art discourse, the piece treats the sermon as a worldview that grants agency to unseen powers while sidestepping the material histories of land use, dispossession, and environmental damage. It asks how faith, nationalism, and technologies of seeing—cinema, tourism, and broadcast preaching—shape who is imagined as belonging to a place, which bodies are protected, and which lives are treated as expendable in the name of order or salvation.
This video takes that claim as a starting point, listening to Billy Graham’s 1975 Texas Tech sermon as an early script for how spiritual authority, moral panic, and national destiny get braided together. Heard in the present, his words echo through the ideology of white Christian nationalism, where invisible forces are imagined as steering both lives and land.
The work layers Graham’s voice over long, slow shots of Big Bend National Park, a landscape often framed as pristine, sacred, and in need of protection, alongside the image of a snake killed on the roadside within the park. This framing unsettles familiar myths of wilderness as untouched or redemptive, making visible how ecological harm and everyday violence persist inside spaces marked as “natural” or “preserved.”
Drawing from ecofeminist and ecological art discourse, the piece treats the sermon as a worldview that grants agency to unseen powers while sidestepping the material histories of land use, dispossession, and environmental damage. It asks how faith, nationalism, and technologies of seeing—cinema, tourism, and broadcast preaching—shape who is imagined as belonging to a place, which bodies are protected, and which lives are treated as expendable in the name of order or salvation.