The Sum of Us

The exhibition has spent its length asking a single question: what could America look like if it were a queer accepting country? This final work answers by handing the question back. Look into it, and you see yourself, but broken into a mosaic of colored circles, pixelated across greens and golds and reds and blues, no single tone claiming the whole.

That fractured reflection is the answer. A queer accepting country does not look like any one person. It looks like all of us at once, every color held in the same frame, every viewer folded into the same image, no one edited out to make the picture simpler. You cannot look into this mirror and see only yourself. You see yourself among everyone else who has stood here, and everyone who will.

Set within an ornate gilded frame, the piece borrows the language of the ancestral portrait, the kind of heirloom mirror that once reflected only those a society chose to honor. Here that frame holds a different picture: not a lineage of the permitted few, but the sum of all of us, reflected back in full color. This is what the country in Imagining Utopia looks like. It looks like everyone who came to see it.