Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality
2020
Two-channel high-definition video (color, sound)
Not on view
New Red Order includes artists and filmmakers who seek to lay bare the “public secret” of the violence of Western expansion. Crimes Against Reality focuses on two public sculptures by James Earle Fraser: End of the Trail (1894), a statue originally intended to be installed on the California coast at the scale of the Statue of Liberty, and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939) that was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in 2022. Both commemorate the origin myth of America.
Here, the artists used photogrammetry to create three-dimensional renderings of the statues, which they then manipulated, destabilizing their meaning. In the artists’ words, this work “morphs monuments into metastasizing flesh . . . literalizing the violence of settler-colonial propaganda, before excising them, clearing space for Indigenous futures.” Crimes Against Reality “returns these monuments to art’s most utopian function as a means to wake us from history’s nightmare.”
Signals: How Video Transformed the World, March 5–July 8, 2023
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