 |
 |
 |
 |
Tolle, Brian
Born 1964, USALives in New York
IN THE GALLERY
Man of Characters, 2006
Franklin’s head, as printed on the one hundred dollar bill, is blown up to cover the wall from floor to ceiling, greeting the gallery visitor from afar. Upon inspection, the lines comprising this giant drawing emerge as writing: aphorisms by Franklin himself. They reveal something of the complexity of this multi-faceted revolutionary. Tolle’s play with distance points towards the relationship between the iconic symbol and its everyday referent, i.e. money, and suggests how the manipulation of “character(s)” or letters produces both an iconic image as well as latent meaning. Challenging what we think we know, the work makes us look twice, and questions the ways in which a culture saturated with logos and icons allocates meaning.
Tolle’s work is strikingly graphic, as if to acknowledge that the brilliant populist Franklin himself employed cartoons and then state-of-the-art public communications strategies to promote political unity.
Die, or Join, 2006
Tolle’s elaborate sculptural installation refers to a famous political cartoon by Benjamin Franklin from 1754. Titled “Join, or Die,” the original publication featured a woodcut of a snake severed into eighths, each segment of which was labeled with the initial of a British-American colony. The cartoon appeared along with Franklin’s editorial about the disunited state of the colonies. The impact of the work was such that during the wars the snake became a popular symbol illustrating the importance of colonial unity.
Tolle has updated Franklin’s snake to reflect current political circumstances: made up of red and blue segments, it is aggressively animate and its two heads further complicate notions of unity and the nation-state. By updating the historical image, Tolle creates a highly ambiguous and complex emblem that deconstructs the ideas and genealogies underlying present global politics and their imagery. After the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the U.S. Navy created a new flag to be flown on all ships “during the global war on terror.” It replaced a blue flag bearing 50 stars that represented 50 equal states. In the new flag the snake is aggressively lashing out, all its segments in full support, with a text warning “Don’t tread on me.”
Delicious
Facebook