Onions places the viewer in the moment when a writer struggles to construct an honest narrative about her struggle with “hiding or ignoring” her “blackness”. While simultaneously replicating the frustrations of being American and being black, when the world tries to erase the latter through the forced assimilation of the…
Black Hole Son, Pete Burkeet takes the viewer on a visual rollercoaster of disastrous spectacle in American consumerism and culture. In 1986, Ohio released 1.5 million balloons, which caused an environmental catastrophe; 16 years later at Big Boom Bay, SanDiego a 17 minute firework display exploded in less than a minute….
In Immigrant Documentation, Linh Dao imagines a future where the immigration process mimics the ease, and flippancy, of our mobile culture. Here, the entirety of a person is distilled into data, barcodes, and numbers through a tracking system that likens “non-citizens” to tracking online packages delivery. Dao presents a powerful statement…
Christina Smiros explores the tensions between technology and the self. In virtual embodidment, she forms and erases her “pixelated form” where she describes her “identity as mine, everyone’s and no one’s–all at once.” The piece questions where the screen begins and the body ends, and who, if anyone, is in…
In Blonde Women Looking Away, Szivlia Ruszev responds to The Broad Museum’s collection of artist and photographer Cindy Sherman alongside “Untitled Films Stills” from the Prelinger Archives. Ruszev explains that the “icon of the Blonde Woman…[evokes] power structures and the objectification of the female body.” The artist suggests watching the…