1

Shelly Silver

2001, 3:12 min, color, sound

An exploration in mood and tone, 1 is a montage of image, music, and language. Against a split-screen study of New York beat cops, Silver presents a sentence, drawn out in single words over the course of the piece. Through subtle word repetition, she alters what would appear to be a unified sentence; this, in addition to the doubled image, calls the work's title into question.

Prototype (God Bless America)

Martha Rosler

2006, 3:57 min, color, sound

In this work, Rosler presents a short but incisive statement. A mechanical toy figure dressed as an American soldier plays "God Bless America" on a trumpet. The camera pans down, revealing that the toy's camouflage-clad trouser leg has been rolled up to uncover a mechanism that looks uncannily like a prosthetic limb.

Red Sourcebook

Ilana Harris-Babou 

2018, 4:12 minutes, color, stereo, HD video

Combining language from Restoration Hardware’s seasonal furniture catalogues with 20th century Federal Housing Authority lending guidelines, Red Sourcebook examines the parallels between the contemporary language of design aesthetics and longstanding justifications for segregation. The Federal Housing Authority guidelines advised banks to adopt exclusionary home loan tactics in a practice known as “redlining,” ultimately driving segregation and houselessness while allowing white homeowners to disproportionately accrue property to pass down between generations. By addressing these sites in tandem, Harris-Babou highlights the reciprocal relationship between the development of home improvement trends and the conflation of private property with white wealth.