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examine their relationship to carceral systems—experiences that aren’t often accompanied by generative or communal discourse. In his book Doing Time on the Outside (2009), legal scholar Donald Braman attributes this lack of discourse to a societal stigma, revealing how it can prevent formerly incarcerated (or detained) people and their families from talking about, or healing from, their experiences—a “social silence,” which, as Braman writes, “mak[es] it difficult for families to seek political remedies for the problems they encounter.”¹ Braman describes this difficulty as a “collective failure” of society to acknowledge and understand the traumas that institutions have imposed on impacted communities. This disjuncture, he asserts, “continues to prevent us from doing the justice we intend.”² Braman’s book presents a series of interrelated problems that In Plain Sight seems to answer, albeit indirectly. If the skytyping actions were an urgent appeal to abolish the corrupt carceral systems that pervade our country, WE LIVE! offers more intimate pathways toward collective healing.
Colleen Hargaden at Hunter Shaw Fine Art September 12– October 25, 2020 Who is a doomsday prepper: a hopeful environmental activist determined to inhabit our planet long after it is beyond repair; an anti-establishment conspiracy theorist attuned
Hannah Sage Kay
to impending social and economic chaos; or a tech industry magnate as terrified of a post-apocalyptic world as of their own mortality? Colleen Hargaden’s exhibition, Strategies for Inhabiting a Damaged Planet at Hunter Shaw Fine Art, reflects this seemingly incongruent cross section of the American public that traverses ideologies, faiths, and parties. While each viewer may easily locate within this work a reflection of their own position—liberal or conservative, hopeful or pessimistic, climate activist or climate denier—Hargaden illuminates the connective tissue uniting these otherwise diametrically opposed publics: a rapidly growing individual istic tendency in our country, an interest in self-preservation above all else. The exhibition presents two distinct, but thematically related, bodies of work produced over the last three years. The first, steeped in natural light from the gallery’s front window, includes two formally analogous pieces, Capsule One: How To Grow Sprouts (2018) and Capsule Two: Portable Apothecary (2020). Each comprises a metal shelving unit with a solar-powered waterproof case, which houses a video tutorial, alongside the materials required to—as their titles suggest—grow alfalfa sprouts or brew a variety of herbal remedies. Hargaden’s instructional videos are also freely available on YouTube, the site from which much of her research and prepper expertise is culled. Using social media and collective know ledge bases as a primary source of information reflects common practices of the 1. WaterBrick International, “Our Vision,” n.d., accessed November 6, 2020, https:// www.waterbrick.org/about-us/.
American public, and raises vital concerns about the veracity of that which is being consumed. An innocent search for how to grow sprouts may easily lead one down a rabbit hole to the less altruistic, environmentally-minded branch of prepping, that of anti-vax conspiracy theories and citizen militias. Installed deeper within the gallery’s unlit interior, the second body of work invites viewers to take a seat on Hargaden’s Water Brick (Furniture) (2019). There, visitors can watch her synchronized, two-channel video entitled Reproducing “H2O” (2019) or peruse a manual which details how to recreate the video frame-by-frame. The two-channel video comprises a small Videotronics tube television monitor playing Ralph Steiner’s 1929 film H2O—one of the first cinematic records of water— and Hargaden’s large-scale recreation of the same work projected on the back side of the gallery’s temporary dividing wall. Black, imageless frames punctuate Hargaden’s version, indicating scenes that she was unable to recreate given the difficulty of reproducing H2O as time and geo-environmental changes impede access to the rapidly dwindling resource. Though WaterBricks were originally conceived as a means to “deliver water and food to people living in remote, impoverished parts of the world [as well as] victims of natural disasters,”¹ the prepping phenomenon, aided by corporate retailers, rebranded this technology to appeal to the average American consumer. In much the same way that Hargaden
