Art (Click image below to play video)
Artist Statement
The Poster Children
(2007), 4 monitors, 2 custom PCs
80″ x 12″ x 4″
9′ loop, silent
Edition of 5 plus 2 APs
The Poster Children is one work in a suite of animated, multi-monitor pieces influenced by the narrative and cartoon-like formats of Asian screen and scroll paintings.
In this panoramic animation, two representative groups at the top of the food chain—people and polar bears—share a quasi-pristine dystopia comprised of slow-moving icebergs and piles of e-waste (discarded electronics components). Each is the poster child for a distinct social issue, and both are natural enemies. Are they a danger to each other, or mutual protectors in a new world, ordered by extreme and reconfiguring environments of the north pole and the Internet?
In 2007, two unconnected social issues floated to the surface of the news. First, is the now-famous image of a pair of polar bears standing on a sculptural chunk of free-floating ice. Al Gore used the image in his slide presentations, intended to raise panic and awareness—the ice is melting, the polar bears are stranded on what little ice remains, and are drowning. The photo quickly became the icon for global warming. It happened that a marine biology grad student named Amanda Byrd took this photo in 2004 while on a research boat, at the warm end of summer, a time when the land’s fringe ice naturally melts. A Canadian Ice Service worker named Dan Crosbie took a copy of the picture from the shared computer on board the icebreaker vessel, claimed it as his own, and gave it to Environment Canada, who in turn distributed the image to 7 media agencies. Soon after, the Toronto Telegraph, The New York Times, London’s Daily Mail and other major papers ran the photograph as the primary illustration of global warming. Then Amanda Byrd came forward publicly, angered that she hadn’t been credited for the image. With this revelation, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing pundits lambasted the image as propaganda promoted by “environmentalist wackos and the . . . Media . . ..” 2007 also saw the birth of Knut, the Berlin Zoo’s hand-raised baby polar bear. Videos of Knut spread like wildfire on youtube, reestablishing the polar bear’s status of “cutest.”
The second issue/image is that of the Virginia Tech Shooter, who perpetrated the “worst school shooting in history.” The best-known images of Cho Seung-Hui are from his suicide video, which he mailed to NBC. In it he looks like he stepped out of (or into) one of John Woo’s hard-boiled and ultra-violent films. NBC dubbed the killer’s video a “multimedia manifesto.” The NBC video was posted to youtube, which led to a spate of youtube responses, including anti-asian hate videos masquerading as news items, music video eulogies, amateur stagings of Cho Seung-Hui’s drama class plays and a copycat “youtube killer” in Finland. Online debates and diatribes erupted about race, immigration, and the ethics of populist media distribution, almost as many as debates about gun laws. I was interested in this shooting in part because the killer was not white (or pink), and I began to research “kids with guns” online. My search procured a dazzling array of videos on youtube, many of proud parents teaching their young sons and daughters how to shoot firearms. These pink children became my source material for the rotoscoped characters in The Poster Children.
Mediated images of the cute and the helpless—endangered animals and children—form the population that is literally collaged into The Poster Children‘s arctic dystopia. The Arctic itself is presented as a flat frontier in which sky and water become one plane; a white-washable, remote stage. Not much happens in here, in this infinitely repeated performance of gestures, a bricolaged display window for an anti-Eden. It is the domain of the innocent: polar bears ranging from cute to carnivorous share real estate with bored pink children who shoot aimlessly at the water. The islands that convey this cast around and around the picture plane are made of ice, but also of e-waste—the junk detritus of the technology that disseminates this media.
Out there along the media conduits are constantly re-collaging territories. The Arctic was recently promoted to yardstick of our planet’s doom. Images of icebergs, animals and kids may be poor signs for harsh realities, but are treated like treasures stolen to fund temporary kingdoms, which spread like viruses, wash up on e-shores, and are quickly forgotten. The Poster Children‘s cast of characters are allowed a break from their ideological duties as mercenary images-for-hire; and on this unified field of an Arctic fantasy, they (or the viewers) might duke out their own turf wars, live side-by-side, or die trying.References
“Polar Bears May Be Listed as Threatened in the USA.” Environment News Service, International Daily Newswire, January 2, 2007.
“How the Environmental Extremists Manipulate the Masses,” by Carole “CJ” Williams. NewsWithViews.com, January 26, 2008.
“Snap! Freezing Bears.” ABC Television Australia, MediaWatch, Transcript, February 4, 2007.
