Rec-elections (Don’t say you don’t remember.)
2019
site-specific installation, vinyl text
72 x 252 inches
Installation view, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, The New School, NY, NY
Rec-elections is an ongoing project (2012-) which unpacks and critiques the weaponization of nostalgia and language used within historical presidential campaign posters, to reveal the underlying ideologies the American Dream is built upon.
I alter and reimagine, these presidential campaign posters, banners and flags, and campaign material and reinsert them back into the public sphere. In different public settings from the Internet to the street to the gallery, they are utilized as tools in site-specific performances, site-specific interventions, prints, flags and installations. Culled from my extensive personal archive of historical presidential campaign posters sourced from online auction sites such as eBay, Rec-elections reveals a romanticized American myth that is built on ideologies that solidify ideas of manifest destiny within the American ethos.
Rec-elections (Don’t say you don’t remember.) was commissioned for the exhibition In The Historical Present and curated by Anna Harsanyi and Macushla Robinson. The slogan “Don’t say you don’t remember.” derives from George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign poster which incorporated an infamous photograph of a distraught woman kneeling by the body of a slain student at the Kent State massacre. In The New School Archives I came across a stylized version of the same Kent State image on the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition My God! We’re Losing a Great Country. This exhibition was staged in 1970 by Parsons students responding to the Kent State shootings.
While they are historically specific, both slogans have a renewed resonance in 2019, specifically in the face of state sanctioned prejudice and violence.The commissioned project consisted of vinyl text, and take-away materials including a free poster in the gallery, and a tote bag available in The New School Store featuring the slogan “Don’t say you don’t remember.”