A SMALL WORLD

A SMALL WORLD/video installation, 1999-2001 created with Sanford Biggers, dimensions variable

a small world…The project was inspired by an intense conversation about our childhood. We realized that we both had several Super 8 family movies and imagined what relationships would become apparent as these two worlds were put side by side.

The result is a nostalgic snapshot portraying cultural and class syncretism. At first glance it is about two American families in the 70's that are racially and physically apart, unconscious of each other, yet simultaneously participating in comparable rituals. In this respect, a small world is an idyllic vision of separate cultures looking at their similarities, not their differences. A closer look however, reveals a small world to be as much about class as it is about ethnicity. The middle class Jewish and African American family (an image invisible until the arrival of the Huxtables in the early eighties), act as a metaphor for the ongoing emergence of the next America... a society delineated more on the lines of economics than ethnicity. This vision of an American culture of class makes us all more interchangeable than we are willing to admit, leaving our individual cultural heritage the only truly distinctive aspect of our identities.

>view excerpt from a small world video

FEATURED in›
• “2002 Whitney Biennial” Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC
• ”Contemporary Art/Recent Acquisition” Jewish Museum, NYC 2003
• ”Somewhere Better Than This Place” Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio 2003
• ”Family Ties” Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. 2003
• ”Social Studies: Eight Artists Address Brown v. Board of Education”
Krannert Art Museum, IL. & University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art 2004
• ”Reverse Negatives” The Gershman Y Borowsky Gallery Philadelphia, PA. 2004
• ”BROOKLinVIDEO” Futura, Praque, Czech Republic 2005
• ”I the ‘Burbs” Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY 2005