American Document
Interactive Istallation

Wednesday, May 30, to Saturday June 16, 2012
Opening: Thursday, June 7, 6–10 pm
A part of the DOC NOW documentary media festival.

Since the conclusion of World War II, the ethos of the Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) and the achievements of the New Deal era have been celebrated and propelled by official rhetoric. American Document is a database documentary which challenges and deconstructs the validity of this long-sustained authority in the United States.

Between 1935 and 1944, the United States Resettlement Administration (1935-1937), Farm Security Administration (1937-1942), and Office of War Information (1942-1944) contributed to the formation and capture of a panoramic portrait of America in the form of a monumental photographic survey. Collectively, these photographs constitute the historic Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information archive and impart an unparalleled documentary account of the New Deal era. Through a creative manipulation of archival photographs drawn from the FSA-OWI archive, American Document reveals the stories of an enduring people whose lives coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in American history. In an era characterized by the effects of the Great Depression and World War II, American Document engages a specific economy of archival evidence to question and illuminate how state socialism was imposed on an unsuspecting people at the expense of individual liberty, free enterprise, and the ebb and flow of the American dream. American Document is inspired by the documentary tradition of representing others, and provokes the audience to assess and consider the New Deal era history in the presence of archival evidence, latent truth, and the artist’s voice. American Document is presented at the IMA Gallery as an interactive installation on web platform.