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Georff McFetridge, detail from 'In the Mind' (photo: Lis Charman)
I took the kids to the Olympic Sculpture Park and visited Geoff McFetridge’s graphic exhibition, In the Mind. It is a cheeky, satiric view of social attitudes:
The…PACCAR Pavilion seems to perfectly suit McFetridge’s poster-based provocations. He treats the giant wall in the pavilion as an oversized bulletin board, complete with out-of-scale thumbtacks. The motifs and posters he developed for the space echo the concerns of many of the sculptures in the park, such as the relationship between man-made and natural forms, the interplay between two- and three-dimensional space, visual conundrums, and the arbitrariness of boundaries between different cultural practices.
I was struck by the Us-Them posters as a perfect encapsulation of Israeli and Palestinian attitudes toward each other. The “Us” poster shows a people in all its diversity. Every person and every detail is lovingly articulated. We know who we are. We appreciate us. We are a family.
“Them” is a dark whole. Nothing is distinguishable. We know nothing about them and can know nothing about them. They are impenetrable. The perfect enemy.
As I said, a perfect emblem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
