At the Museum: A Pilgrimage of Vanquished Objects, produced during an Artist-In-Residence at the Oakland Museum, explores how all types of archiving, including documentary filmmaking, inevitably construct history from the artifacts collected.

Using the Oakland Museum’s displays and collections as an environment, the film’s narrator leads the viewer on a tour of a mythical museum during which displays and the individuals represented within them come alive and discuss how their role as artifact and image contrasts with their actual lives.  For example, the film looks at the famous Dorothea Lange photograph of “The Migrant Mother” included in the museum’s archive.  We then meet one of the children in the photograph, now almost 60 years old and she talks about the difference between her life as an image and her life as a woman with children of her own.

The narrator offers various interpretations of each display and challenges the authority of the educational museum, of documentary filmmaking, and the voice of the narrator itself.  The tour ends in the Natural Science department, confronted by an environmental condition that maps the history of progress.