This collage contemplates the banality of toxicity and its overwhelming whiteness. How are the mundane activities of powerful white people steeped in toxicity? Together, the images make a critique of indiscernable toxicity in the everyday lives of white settlers. Some of the faces look at each other, as if in a continuous conversation, but across places and times.
As other, a non-white viewer looking on, in awe, and in condemnation.
If overlayed upon each other, the collage would acquire more texture. As is, the collage is flat and does not evoke the sedimented layers that these toxic people, across toxic places and periods, are implicated in.
This image made me recoil at first glance; I had a rather visceral reaction to it. Visually speaking, it may be more effective to have the more "active" images placed more strategically in the image.
What does it mean to characterize people or behavior as "toxic"?This image makes me curious about the capacity and limits of toxicity as an analytical category applied to people. Characterize sunshine-based California boosterism as a "toxic" effort to claim exclusive land rights makes me think of Lisa Park and David Pellow's critique of "nativist environmentalism" in Aspen (The Slums of Aspen, 2011).
