Yearbook
"When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning", Jean Baudrillard, 1998.
While it has long been known that memories are unreliable, and that nostalgia is a sentiment loaded with both longing and fiction, what has changed is our relationship to the present in our post-truth era. This loss of faith in a notion of reason, and the consequent absence of a shared agreement of facts, also alters the self. A once fragmented self is now subsumed into a digital media fiction where any previous anchors of certainty have been removed. It is to this that nostalgia now applies itself.
This paradigm shift to a world of ‘alternative facts’ happened, at least in the public’s eye, with the aftermath of the Sandy Hook tragedy. On December 14, 2012, a mass shooting occurred at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, United States. Twenty of the victims were children between six and seven years old. In the weeks that followed a number of fringe figures promoted conspiracy theories that disputed what occurred. While some claimed that the massacre was orchestrated by the U.S. government as part of an elaborate plot to promote stricter gun control laws, the conspiracy theory that gained traction, and popularized by Alex Jones on his Info Wars podcast, denied that the massacre actually occurred at all, asserting that it was faked. It claimed the event was a classified training exercise involving members of federal and local law enforcement, the news media, and ‘crisis actors’, which they claim was modelled on Operation Closed Campus, an Iowa school-shooting drill that was cancelled in 2011 amid threats and public outcry. Jones described the shooting incident as "synthetic, completely fake with actors". It is to this loss of trust in what we know that these ink drawings address. Each of the children is drawn from Google images search, while trying to fix them in ink seems analogous to holding onto a fading memory as an idea of what might constitute a fact.
India ink on paper
2024
