Christie Xu

A Place On Earth

“Heaven is a place on earth with you/Tell me all the things you wanna do” <video games> by Lana Del Ray is the inspiration behind the title.

The imagery of United States is often romantized and filled with over-documented cultural iconography, highways, celebrities and stereotypes. This project features documentary photographs of the mundane landscape and scenary observed on a single-engine airplane, often used by private pilot at the start of their career. Combined with written notes, aviation charts and maps, A Place On Earth explores the aesthetic of indexicality through analog film, time based media and collage.

Unlike the flat perspective of satellite imagery and views above the from commercial airplanes, the experience of navigating a single-engine aircraft tend to faces more variables, from weather conditions, airspace regulations, to mechanical limitations. What does it mean to navigate space without the assurance of permanence? And how can photography reconcile the tension between nostalgia and immediacy? Through its unconventional approach to mapping, A Place On Earth reimagines landscape with airial gaze, capturing the transient instances inbetween control and surrender, detachment and intimacy, past and present.