A self-described “public secret society,” New Red Order includes artists and filmmakers who seek to lay bare the “open secret” of the violence of Western expansion. Focusing on two public sculptures by James Earle Fraser—End of the Trail (1928), a statue located in Waupun, Wisconsin, and the statue of Theodore Roosevelt (1939) that was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in 2022—Culture Capture: Crimes against Humanity attempts to “spectrally and digitally repatriate Indigenous objects.”
The artists used photogrammetry to scan the sculptures from all angles and create three-dimensional renderings, exploring the “capture” of both images and cultures through technology. The monuments to the origin myth of the Americas appear to dissolve and implode, morphing from digital pixels into flesh-like forms. “Our aim,” the group says, “is to imagine something through and beyond that can address and promote Indigenous futures.”
Gallery label from Signals: How Video Transformed the World, March 5–July 8, 2023
