Shayna Rosendorff
Tungsten (w)

Size Framed: 660 x 660mm
Medium: Digital Collage on Prestige Fine Art Textured Silk Paper

In this limited edition artwork, “Tungsten”, Shayna uses a collage of Tungsten mines, part of a series, to explore the impact of ongoing global resource extraction from Africa by photographing locations through Google Earth. The series presents satellite images of various mines across the continent, where the digitized visuals aim to reflect the real world but instead construct a curated illusion—a façade of augmented reality created “in collaboration” with Google Earth satellites. This invites one to question the picturesque presentation of human-driven destruction and the narratives we are encouraged to accept. This viewpoint—a detached, omnipotent gaze—suggests power and control, evoking the historical use of maps and landscapes as tools for dominance and distortion. The work critiques the supposed authenticity of these representations, highlighting how they shape our understanding of the world while perpetuating a biased, inaccessible perspective. The image creates an unsettling aesthetic tension, an appreciation of their visual beauty while confronting the unsettling realities and encouraging a reconsideration of what has been erased, silenced, or marginalized.

Artist Biography