tyler mcphee


Hindenburg, 2009 (Fiberglass, Steel, Vacuum Formed Plastic, Light bulb)

First, as an overt object of Nazi propaganda, then one of the first widely disseminated images of disaster footage and in support of American capitalist mass media, the airship Hindenburg has always been an object whose use value was appropriated for greater ideological purposes. I want to wrap my hands around the spectacle and have an authentic, physical knowledge other than the mediated event. Oh the Humanity! posits the Hindenburg accident in sculptural form to reintroduce the original spectacle in an everyday domestic object: the floor lamp. The utilization of such spectacular imagery creates ironic posture of the work acknowledges the inability for those not there, by time or space, to have known this event and in doing so is a stance on the importance of breaking through the image to see the actual circumstance of tragedy occurring in the age of television, movies, and viral video. .