folk politics

Wooden structures, clay, fabric (12.00"x18.00"x15.50"/5.5"x14"x13"/5.50"x21.00"x9.00")
Installation shots of ”Folk Politics," featuring four handmade puppets.
The companion essay, "you can do the macarena to any song" is online at donotresearch.net.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT: Taken from Inventing the Future, “folk politics” describes the tendency in which direct action and flashmob-style collectivity are seized as sites of vitality by grassroots movements. The goal is to create “tears in the social fabric”: a temporary and psychedelic view of a post-capitalist utopia. The body of work included in my thesis show surveys utopian visions, from the limited ruptures seen in both BLM 2020 and Occupy Wall Street, to the promises of digital era, to the promise of some kind of “return,” to the continued presence of the American Dream. While critical of each utopia’s attempt to be coherent politically, I do not wish to preclude the joys of playfulness, self-realization, and collectivity that they offer. Rather, I seek to present them just as they are: in miniature. In the absence of a popular, sustained leftist vision of modernity, we live with what Mark Fisher calls “a slow cancelation of the future.”