Fear and Excess
I had been distressed for some time at the political and cultural climate of this country and had been mulling over how I would like to approach making something as a response to it. Something on the radio one day drew me to the idea of fear being the basis for much that is wrong in the world. Fear as
a political tool and as a personal inhibitor. Could fear also have something to do with all the excesses we find in this society?
I collected essays on the topic of fear as a political tool, from how the threat of slave revolts was used to keep a fearful population in check during the days of slavery, to essays and interviews about the climate of politically induced fear we live in today. In the middle of the book is a section of questions harvested from an on-line advise forum from people who are scared of one thing or another in their personal lives. The back of the book holds all of the answers these people received. The end papers contain an exhaustive alphabetical list of phobias.
The photographs I collected from the internet explore this idea of excess as excess of wealth, patriotism, vanity, etc. I brought each one up on my computer screen and photographed my screen in order to create a higher resolution image and also give the photographs the quality of being seen from a TV or security camera. This filter is a distancing from the subject that plays into the fear aspect of the book.
