Color of Confusion

• October 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Featuring Sylvie Blocher

Guest Curated by David S. Rubin

Color of Confusion features 3 video works by renowned Paris-based artist, Sylvie Blocher that address issues of cultural identity and representation through community collaboration. Invited by curator David S. Rubin to create community-oriented, socially-engaged work, exploring themes relevant to the people of San Antonio, Blocher completed Alamo, Skintone, and Color following research in 2013 and video production in 2014. Color of Confusion at Contemporary at Blue Star is the U.S. premiere of all three videos. The works first debuted in August 2014 in Blocher’s retrospective exhibition at MUDAM, the Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg.

Alamo, Skintone, and Color were originally commissioned by the San Antonio Museum of Art and directed by David S. Rubin, Independent Curator and former Brown Foundation Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Alamo features four actors: a Caucasian, a Latinx, an African-American, and a Native American. Each is shown standing before a model of the Alamo while telling a version of the Alamo’s history. Naturally, each has a different perspective. One of the texts is taken directly from docent-led tours given at the Alamo at the time. Local writers scripted the other three texts.

Skintone features over fifty Latinx volunteers, who stand silently before a backdrop with vertical bands of color, each a different flesh tone, moving from light to dark. The participants were asked to choose where they want to stand in front of the backdrop, while random excerpts from interviews conducted with the volunteers about their personal experiences with their skin color stream along the bottom of the frame.

In Color, a young girl fires a shotgun at a piece of paper with the word “color” written on it, aiming to hit the word. Filmed in the Texas Hill Country on the ranch of Becky Crouch Patterson, a descendant of a group of utopist intellectuals who had emigrated from Germany after the revolution of 1848 to create free communities in the US with equal rights for men and women, the video documents the serendipitous flapping of the paper caught by the wind as bullets try to hit their mark.