Are you red? Or are you Blue?

Jonathon Tellier employed performance, installation, and mail-art techniques to explore nationalism, the ideological value of “unity,” and the purported division of the U.S. into “red” and “blue” states. Dressed as “Uncle Sam,” he used balloons to distribute surveys in both “blue” (i.e., urban, coastal), and “red” (rural, inland) areas of California, with questions about America, faith, modernity, politics, fear, beauty, and violence. The collected responses were presented at Mission 17, and visitors to the gallery were invited to contribute to the discussion with answers of their own. A video projection showed the artist as “Uncle Sam,” conducting his survey in San Francisco, Stockton, and on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento. The ceiling of the gallery was decorated with red and blue balloons, which had machine-gun rifles hanging beneath them. And the windows of the gallery were covered with large-scale prints of the eyes of America’s founding fathers.

The show moved between the gallery and the street in an effort to generate dialogue about who “we” are as Americans, what we value most, and how we find ourselves situated by ideological categories. Tellier called into question the division between art and science in social research, providing an alternative model of discursive engagement, which challenged the purported “objectivity” of sociological surveys by directly engaging the theatrics and rhetorical devices that inform our sense of ourselves as a nation.