On Fantasy and Forgetting.
I remember hearing a quote from Cornell West about our habit of reimagining violent history as something heroic. He used the conquest of the American West and the “Cowboys & Indians” trope as an example. It is something I think about very often.
These images are made from multiple screen captures from old episodes of The Lone Ranger. Each represents a sequence of actors and their movements across the land. When overlaid in standard NTSC colors, the landscapes remain solid and unaffected while the actors become translucent cartoons, highlighting their artificiality. They are, after all, simple illusions. Men playing dress-up, unaware of the reality they are reimagining.
Some images in the series have been arranged so the color spectrum makes them completely unrecognizable as anything but false. They become playful little tributes to a violent and forgotten truth.