ACTIONS SPEAK

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Can a picture in a museum—even a 67-foot mural -- counter political indifference? Can it provoke us to consider the ways silence amidst a discourse of brutality (whether state-sanctioned, media-driven, or personally inflicted) disconnects us from the individuals living halfway around the world or in our own neighborhoods whose bodies are affected? THINK AGAIN believes it can.*

 

ACTIONS SPEAK (2008-2010) debuted at the Worcester Art Museum a few days before the 2008 election. This multimedia project featured a 67-foot interior wall mural and a concurrent outdoor projection. The project focused on the connections between political brutality and public policy while reconsidering the social problems of HIV/AIDS and violence against women. ACTIONS SPEAK promoted dialogue between art and public response, between global reality and local action, between media misinformation and lived experience.

 

ACTIONS SPEAK is a hybrid of photography, drawing, etching, digital design and text. The mural's iconography -- a mass of paper bones entangled in the cords of monumental microphones  -- links political discourse directly to individual bodies. Resting on a field of salt and ash, one microphone is covered with a red condom and the other with violently smashed lipstick. The microphone is a signature image for THINK AGAIN and operates as a double-edged metaphor for political possibility, on the one hand, and voicelessness, apathy and censorship, on the other. The microphone's entangled relation to the femur bones -- a proxy for the body -- raises the question: Who gets to speak and who lives with the consequences?

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The mural's themes of brutality and stigmatization are echoed in the corresponding moving projection on the museum's facade. Streetside, the image of an open microphone awaiting a speaker is accompanied by a cascade of words from the mural, out of which emerge ideas of empowerment and action. 

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*Excerpt from museum catalogue by Curator, Susan Stoops. View the video projection by clicking and scrolling down the page. 

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