Sylvie Blocher’s Color of Confusion was produced through a collaboration with the artist and the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA). The production was directed by David S. Rubin, Independent Curator and former Brown Foundation Curator of Contemporary Art at SAMA. In 2012, Blocher was invited by SAMA to create new community-oriented, socially-engaged work exploring themes of relevance to San Antonio. Blocher visited San Antonio in January 2013 to conduct focus groups and research. She returned one year later to shoot three videos: Alamo, Skintone, and Color. The three videos debuted in August 2014 in Sylvie Blocher’s retrospective exhibition at MUDAM, the Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg.

Alamo features four actors: a Caucasian, a Latino, an African American, and a Native American. Each is shown standing before a model of the Alamo while telling the Alamo’s history. Naturally, each has a different perspective. One of the texts is taken directly from docent-led tours given at the Alamo at the time. The other three texts were scripted by local writers.

Skintone features over fifty Latino volunteers, who stand silently before a backdrop with vertical bands of color, each a different flesh tone, moving from light to dark. The participants were asked to choose where they want to stand in front of the backdrop, while text from interviews with them about their personal experiences with their skin color stream at random at the bottom of the frame.

In Color, a young girl fires a shotgun at a piece of paper with the word “color” written on it. “When she fired the gun, standing behind the ranch, I framed her on the backdrop of the vast landscape. I stuck a piece of paper with the word ‘COLOR’ written on it to a tree–an abstract word that gives no indication of nature or gender. Then I asked her to shoot on this word…At the exact moment when she fired the gun, the wind picked up, and the paper suddenly started spinning and flapping frenetically in the wind as though trying to escape. The bullets were bound to miss the word. The team fell silent. We were unable to name what we had just witnessed. The paper had come alive.”–Sylvie Blocher

Color of Confusion runs October 4, 2018-January 6, 2019. Opening is on October 4 from 7-10 p.m.