Artworks

Kevin Cooley’s video installation, Clear as Day (2019), debuted in the gallery’s Media Room during a group exhibition Don’t Touch My Circles, which featuring work by Kim Beck, Nicki Green, Bill Jacobson, Jana Sophia Nolle, Stephanie Syjuco, Marie Watt, and a special Viewing Room presentation of The Truth Be Told by LigoranoReese. The video comprises a real-time twitter feed of the hashtag #climateaction, a term that Cooley notes in “often used to denote there is still hope for the environment.” By presenting this scrolling text on the gallery wall over projected clouds of billowing red, white, and blue smoke, the work becomes a visual manifestation of political and environmental dialogues taking place online. Cooley remarks that “tweets containing this term appear dozens of times an hour on average. As they scroll by, the installation references the short-lived relevance of any singular tweet among the 350 million that are posted every day. As the tweets build up over the day, the work highlights Twitter’s collective impact, becoming a visualization of social media’s power to connect us, while also underlining the increasing difficulty in distinguishing truth and relevance in the online world.