“Fabric of a Nation”. This piece will be included in “Local Legends” at @mirusgallery opening Friday March 4th.
So, we often use this metaphor “fabric of a nation” to describe an underlying social order in a given place. In this country, the United States, we have spent the past few decades in a perpetual state of unraveling, reconfiguring and wearing some swatches of that fabric threadbare. This fabric is the battlefield. A war between fundamentalists and progressives or more concisely between: what was, and what will be. More recently it’s become a battle between democracy and some quasi autocratic fist-pumping pro-freedom (for some) disinformation campaign. So we tear, mend and re-orientate the scraps of the fabric, in an effort to make that fabric either more inclusive and fair or more exclusive and entitled depending or your position in the political spectrum. There are some, somewhere in the middle still sipping lemonade on a long summer’s afternoon waxing sentimental for the old 13 horizontal stripes and 50 white stars and a return to a simpler time. As if they are waiting for a storm to pass, waiting for the climate to cool and waiting for some strange antiquated white protestant leaning agenda to settle back into a lull of contentment. On the further ends of the spectrum are the fascists we fought to defeat 80 years ago and the progressives we in large part assassinated 60 years ago.
In the balance, the 3rd largest population and 4th largest land mass sit in front of phones tossing impotent insults, in a fog of disinformation, echo chambers and blaming. It’s a patchwork of failure and dysfunction. Eventually, that scale will tip. Either toward democracy, inclusiveness and grand aspirations or toward some romantic notion of a past that propped up “some” at the expense of many. Tattered as it may seem, understand that this fabric is still being woven.
Eddie 