Artist, Garrett Bradley: My name is Garrett Bradley and I am welcoming you today to America.
What you are seeing right now is what I'd like to think of a visual chronology of history. You are moving through the years of 1915 to 1926 and what you are seeing are moments in time and individuals in Black history that are lesser known. And really what the work is asking you to think about is that this isn't just about Black history but an American history.
The work itself is being projected onto four white flags. And I wanted that white flag to be the thing that carries us through our entire journey over the course of those twelve years.
We see Donna Crump walking down a road where there’s a lot of sugar cane fields. And we see a man in a KKK uniform and she tears it apart and reassembles it into a white sheet, so it's freed from its previous identity. We see it fly through the sky, we see it fall onto a clothing line, and then we see it leave the clothing line, and it falls into the Buffalo Soldiers’ headquarters. And from there it's taken on to become this white flag. And I liked the idea of trying to subvert or rework the meaning of the white sheet, to think about the white sheet as a seemingly mundane object, which depending on who's holding it and how it's arranged creates a completely different meaning.
When we think about what American symbols are, what American nostalgia is, what the aesthetics around Americana can be, a goal of mine, actually with all of my work, was for people to be able to freeze the film at any moment and that that image that's there could be a billboard. It could be on a cereal box. It could disrupt the iconography that we have grown up with around us that also tells us who we are, to force flexibility within those definitions.
