We People
15 x 70 x 15 in. 2019
kinetic motion painting sculpture, projector, electronics, cast plaster Washington & Jefferson
presidential busts on painted aluminum surveyors tripod
video documentation excerpt
During the current administration, a confluence of events is giving the world as we know it a “shaken, not stirred” sense of urgency. All cities are filled with the majority of their citizens walking around 24/7 with instant media distribution centers and high-quality production resources on their mobile phones.
About a decade ago, I was invited to Charlottesville Virginia, a place that felt to me like any other US music-and-artsy, foodie-filled, fashion-forward, historic sight-seeing, rapidly-gentrifying college town—a relatively do-able commute to both Washington, DC and New York. I was contacted by a very cool young group of locals who had recently started a nonprofit organization called The Bridge PAI. Its mission was to bring communities grappling with growing income disparity and mushrooming rents into spaces where art and music events are produced, often in parking lots and alleyways, as well as community centers, all run out of a tiny industrial building at an intersection of historically black and working class neighborhoods. Their intention was to activate a new kind of roving “Public Square,” one that was fluid and organic and designed to bring neighbors together in safe and stimulating creative ways, in the hopes of engaging new conversations and dialogues between people who might not have other life opportunities to interact.
I, an artist and film maker, along with some musicians, printmakers, bloggers, and designers, came up with a week-long project that involved building a large geodesic dome and projecting motion-painting portraits of various people we encountered in our walks about town. I used a stop-motion camera technique, where I shot a frame every seven seconds while painting a portrait from looking at a photograph of one of these randomly encountered citizens from Charlottesville. Then the next day, I’d come in the studio and without totally buffing it out, I’d paint a new portrait of another person from the neighborhood directly on top of the one I had finished the day before. This went on for a few weeks, and the resulting footage of 10,000-plus digital stills was rendered in a way that allowed me to turn the painted heads from side to side, blink their eyes, and mimic the subtle gestures one might see in a person sitting while getting their portrait painted. This projection sculpture was presented all over town in different locations every night as the sun set and people were generally coming home from work. It was thrilling to play the fly on the wall as people discovered a huge new geodesic face of one of their neighbors pop up and glow in a different spot each evening.
In the first year of a new president’s administration, many things can go wrong. A team of experts, speech writers, coaches, and diplomatic professionals usually work closely with our nation’s top leader to ensure the messaging is inclusive and reflective of the shared goals of all people in our nation and world. We all bear witness to a manic daily news feed, simultaneously streaming analysis, and highlights of both left-and right-leaning chatter. The last three years have been a shock to our collective sanity.
On August 12, 2017, Heather Heyer, was killed and twenty-eight others were injured, requiring surgeries and hospitalization when a group of fringe, mostly White Nationalistic-leaning young men in high school prep jock haircuts and fashions, carrying tiki torches, gathered around a monument of Thomas Jefferson on the Rotunda on the campus of UVA without a permit. The steadily streamed broadcast of this racist and demonstratively aggressive human storm sparked an uncontrollable swell of emotion and reaction that spilled into the streets of a usually quiet shopping and dining part of downtown Charlottesville The following day a well-planned-in-advance protest, March for Diversity, collided with a number of hate groups flocking to the Unite the Right Nationalistic Gun owner activist hornet’s nest and the resulting brawls spilled blood all across downtown Charlottesville.
This peace has no justice. This piece of art is no monument. These people are We. And We are Them. - David Ellis