Liberty Weeps |
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AVENTURA, Fla. — Elliott Earls’s reinterpretation of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” practically screams. A little girl seems to be crying, her eye bruised, with an American flag in the background and two words framing her figure: “Liberty Weeps.” The color scheme is red, white and blue, but patriotic pride has been supplanted by sadness.
“She is begging us with her eyes to take responsibility for our actions as a nation,” Mr. Earls said of his creation in an e-mail message. “And to live up to the greatness embedded in our social fabric by the brilliance of our founding fathers.”
Clearly, Rockwell’s America this is not. It is Sunday afternoon at the Aventura Mall in South Florida, and I’ve come to gauge the impact of a handful of images displayed in 14-foot-high posters near Nordstrom. Culled from a surprising new exhibition at the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University titled “Thoughts on Democracy,” they are all artists’ responses to Rockwell’s wartime “Four Freedoms” series...
Damien Cave – The New York Times July 9th 2008.
On July 9th in an article entitled Rockwell Re-enlisted for a Nation’s Darker Mood Damien Cave profiled my recent poster for the Wolfsonian Museum's exhibition entitled Thoughts on Democracy. The article is also available in Europe in the Herald Tribune.
Read the full New York Times article here...
Thoughts on the design process
When asked to respond to Norman Rockwell's original work, I went through a period of deep reflection. Prior to actually working visually, I struggled with how to encapsulate the complexity of what I wanted to say in a single image. Often political work seems very heavy handed and seems to lack nuance. As the deadline approached a kind of clarity settled over me and the image of Eugène Delacroix's nineteenth century painting "Liberty Leading the People " plagued me. In Delacroix's work it is the use of allegory that I found so intriguing and appropriate. Allegory is when the literal content of a work stands for abstract ideas, suggesting a parallel, deeper symbolic realm. I felt the use of allegory might enable me to invest the work with the complexity and power I so desperately needed.
I chose to work with my three year old daughter Scarlett to strengthen the allegory. Children have a kind of openness, honesty and innocence that would seem necessary to the idea of Liberty. Young children can be blind to race, creed, sex and power. In about twenty minutes I took over three-hundred and fifty high resolution digital photographs of Scarlett for the project. during the photo shoot. there was a period of approximately four minutes where Scarlett began to cry. I held down the shutter release button and took about fifty photographs that captured a vast range of emotions that spanned sadness, anger and fatigue. I then spent about twelve hours comparing all fifty faces attempting to select just the right facial expression. I spent another four days digitally compositing the right head with the right body, manufacturing the smoke and arranging the image.
This entire process was in service of a larger idea. I wanted the image to be conceptually focused but to be open to interpretation. I think that it's possible to read the image in such a way that Liberty is weeping over the victims of September 11th. Or that Liberty is weeping over or the loss of civill liberties in the War on Terror. Or that Liberty is weeping wherever justice is perverted, or over the war in Iraq, or over the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Or for our Fallen servicemen.
As part of the exhibition at the Wolfsonian Musem I have been asked to write, produce a new multi-media performance piece entitled "Thoughts on Democracy." It will debut at the museum during the opening at Art Basel Miami Beach on December 5th. During this writing process I have struggled with a vast range of emotions when I reflect on the state of Democracy in America. In essence I have come to the realization that the optimism, clarity and hope exemplified by Dr. King, John Kennedy and Jefferson has been perverted by the small-minded in pursuit of a partisan political agenda. This agenda fueled by xenophobia seems to have lost sight of the central tenant of the American experiment in democracy: In the words of Abraham Lincoln - the great emancipator - "...our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." As a country, I see no evidence that we are behaving with absolute respect or the unalienable rights that this great nation was founded upon.
Yes I'm sad. In my poster this is embodied in a beautiful, innocent crying child. She is begging us with her eyes to take responsibility for our actions as a nation, and to live up to the greatness embedded in our social fabric by the brilliance of our founding fathers.