In Mexico, landscape painting often acted as a mechanism for colonial subjugation, perpetuating Eurocentric artistic and historical values. The video piece PORTRAIT OF A NATION examines José María Velasco’s pastoral landscapes as instruments of surveillance and colonial violence. José María Velasco is considered one of the most influential artists who made Mexican geography a symbol of national identity through his landscape paintings. By re-photographing Velasco’s landscape paintings with a surveillance camera and re-staging them with the collaboration of the indigenous Purhépecha people in Mexico, this video piece addresses the complexities of the political geography of race in Mexico, rendering landscape painting and video technologies as assemblages of surveillance.