Rainbow Hash
Drew Broderick
Lawrence Seward

March 9 - 30, 2019

Assembled surfaces slip between fantasies of Hawaiʻi, as a tropical island paradise of the Pacific, and of New York, as a sophisticated urban epicenter of arts and culture. The mythos of each place is read against one another. U.S. Empire, Pop culture, colonial capitalism, settler-militarism, international tourism, globalization, watery potentials, oceanic connections, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and consumption, resource extraction, the “Polynesian body,” exoticization, fruit, environmental catastrophe, urban development, repetitious production, displacement, dispossession, cartography, modernism, romanticism, plantation life, kitsch, souvenirs. What a mess!

At times directed to a friend, at times to a stranger, at times to a public, at times to a community, at times to one’s self—actual and imagined:

“Will I ever get home?”

“It’s so nice here! I can sit back and forget about all the problems facing the world.”

“What did E.T.’s mother say to him when he got home? What?Where on Earth have you been!?”

“Time stands still here … blue sky meets the turquoise waters”

“Here’s to the end of Empire!!! A hui hou…”

In time, even the most acerbic criticisms become cliché, much like the “artwork” in this exhibition. If there are transformations at play, they are relatively mundane—offering an everyday form by which friends may stay connected and pass time. These postcards-cum-mail art take boredom very seriously as a site of potential to reactivate the space between here and there, neither here nor there.

Postmarked.