We All Have Our Fourths of July (Dream State)
This piece is a new media collage that appropriates and stretches to absurdity a
portion of Slim Aarons’ Poolside (1970) and juxtaposes it with, first, a press image
of the National Guard shootings of college students at Kent State (also 1970) and,
second, an image of Dr. Martin Luther King taken after his “I Have A Dream”
Speech and shortly before his assassination. Referencing that Dream and Kent
State, the piece offers a theory that temporal comparisons—asking what is going
on for different people at different places at about the same time—need not be
expressed by language to successfully convey and document what is going on.
Somatically, the elongated bodies and hazy layers perhaps create a body sensation
of floating serenely above images of tragedy and injustice. Emotionally, the piece
may cause any range of emotions—or none at all. Visually, in addition to
appropriating Aarons, the piece references Barbara Kruger’s use of text-and-image,
Richard Prince’s appropriated myths of America, and, indirectly, activist montages
of Hank Willis Thomas and others. But here the tone is not confrontation but
evaporation—what is lost and do we even care. As possible post-theory art, the
piece may not fully land in the head; does it have too few words? It may land more
in the body, or even the heart, even pleasantly, if seen for its colors and shapes,
and not for what those colors and shapes say here.
This piece is a new media collage that appropriates and stretches to absurdity a
portion of Slim Aarons’ Poolside (1970) and juxtaposes it with, first, a press image
of the National Guard shootings of college students at Kent State (also 1970) and,
second, an image of Dr. Martin Luther King taken after his “I Have A Dream”
Speech and shortly before his assassination. Referencing that Dream and Kent
State, the piece offers a theory that temporal comparisons—asking what is going
on for different people at different places at about the same time—need not be
expressed by language to successfully convey and document what is going on.
Somatically, the elongated bodies and hazy layers perhaps create a body sensation
of floating serenely above images of tragedy and injustice. Emotionally, the piece
may cause any range of emotions—or none at all. Visually, in addition to
appropriating Aarons, the piece references Barbara Kruger’s use of text-and-image,
Richard Prince’s appropriated myths of America, and, indirectly, activist montages
of Hank Willis Thomas and others. But here the tone is not confrontation but
evaporation—what is lost and do we even care. As possible post-theory art, the
piece may not fully land in the head; does it have too few words? It may land more
in the body, or even the heart, even pleasantly, if seen for its colors and shapes,
and not for what those colors and shapes say here.
