WHITEOUT
(2009-ongoing)
WhiteOut is a tongue-in-cheek look at the tendency for people to want quick fix identity commodities that enable them to pay lip service to changing the world and pimp their image at the same time. It takes its cue from one of the more outlandish geoengineering schemes that I have encountered – in order to halt global warming we should just cover large areas of the earth in white to reflect back the heat of the sun and make up for the melting polar ice caps.
My suggestion is that, following this logic and taking into account the rising global population, we should all wear white reflective hats. I have been working on this scheme for some time now, including a hat that I constructed for my mother out of old bras and underwear and the white box hats that I had my fellow Art Practice students at Stanford wear while performing a yoga sun salute. The WhiteOut instructional pamphlet hat (pictured above) is stylistically inspired by aircraft safety cards and takes this work into the realm of the multiple. I have given away hundreds of pamphlet hats at several art events including, most recently, at a street stall for the Zero One Biennale in San Jose, California.