Designer [Digital + Experiential]
Vincent Valdez
The City I
2015-16
They once visited in a dream, a nightmare of smokescreens and woven cloth of white...
.....not the kind of ivory on wedding dresses or love letter parchment yellowed over time.
No.
This was the sterility of fluorescent lights, the kind that burns your eyes, the sickly glow of some ionized scar perfumed by the air of high-minded ‘civility’. Cloth of white, heart of darkness.
Stark was the contrast, against the night that was never black, but rather a muted iteration of that same white, the same white but dipped over and over in the paint that was of hatred, if the scientists were to reach in the air and extract the essence that was of the worst of humanity and
bottled it up in a haze, if that was made a product and they would line up in droves to drink the elixir, they and their friends, they and their families, they and their children.
Forms that were all at once familiar and unfamiliar.
The wrinkles of cloth do not veil their abstract monstrosity as much as they would think, nor do they untether them from such present realities. Scan such a wretched foreground: a beer can
there, an iPhone here. Their chariot of choice, a Chevrolet pickup truck with its headlights on,even then, that white emanates a ghastly glow, an oxymoron of light that dims.The hoods that cover their faces cannot hide the eyes that dwell in those lifeless sockets of shadows. Dimmed and corrupted, but human nonetheless.
See, they’re not ghosts. They’re not monsters in that dreaded nightmare you wake up from and pack away in that attack of your mind’s castle, a boogey man of convenience. They are beside you, they are behind you, they are the multitude, the systems all at once, the rules and walls and
cages and razor wire. They are the ones who get married in the church down the street, who now worship a wizard of broken tires, chewed up grass, their cross now an abandoned telephone post
echoing a tired record report.
Oh and look, a torch on the far most left. A perversion of Prometheus’ sacrificial gift to man. Flames that should illuminate the path of progress, leading souls towards the greatest truth of thegreatest beyond, bastardized by backwards thought, dark ages of disgust. No light comes from
that torch, just ashes from the flame, ashes to ashes, drifting through the arid rural sky, landing
on white cloth.
Made gray.