The MSU Residential College in the Arts and Humanities is sponsoring “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics,” the fourth annual artist in residence exhibition in the series “Perspectives on African-American Experience: Emerging Visions” Monday through Feb. 13 at the LookOut! Art Gallery.
Artists Justin Randolph Thompson and Bradly Dever Treadaway are in residency in the college through Saturday, and have been engaging in workshops with RCAH students in preparation for the opening of their exhibit.
The work of Thompson and Treadaway explores generational divisions, cultural fragmentation, cross-racial dialogues and the disparate knowledge of identities created by collective imagination. Reflecting on assumptions about how patriotism is defined, it juxtaposes elements from the American folk legacy and from African-American oppositional struggles with mainstream cultural features and their legacy of oppression.
“Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” draws its title from Mark Twain’s classification of three types of lies. It employs photography, video, sound-based sculpture, performance and installation to challenge notions of classification as they are applied to artistic practice and to socio-political understandings.