Bakersfield, CA (Series), 2013-2015
From a talk given in Rotterdam:
“The work is built from two rolls of found film with images of a white American family and their friends in a suburban environment. In some of the photographs the daily life of the family is interrupted from its normality by the appearance of a Nazi swastika. The origin of the film is most likely the city Bakersfield in California.
Between the 1890’s and 1960’s the sense of normality occupied by those living in white privilege, shifted from stable supremacist legal definitions and territories backed by state violence to more psychological and mythological positions of violent projection and fantasy. The hyperbolic scale of this brutality is still felt on many levels in the United States, hidden and dark as the muddy mold on a flag left in the attic, rotten and constantly growing through the reproduction of whiteness as an affiliation with death.
I responded through abstract tempera paintings, a selected printing of the two film rolls, in an installation with disrupted glass panels. Thereby creating a context for an emotional appraisal of an aspect of American culture, one that is rarely self-described, because to do so would demand defining the core as founded in racism.”
View individual works from series _(link)
Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam exhibition website _(link)
Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam press release _(link)
