Activating Art
Blake Unger Dvorchik
Blake Unger Dvorchik
Our Limited Bill of Rights
Our Limited Bill of Rights consists of a room-sized art installation on the history of Civil Liberties within the United States; detailing both their importance, and their history of suspension and repression. My goal is to condense this history into an accessible and provocative form, so that viewers can place the current political climate within the context of that history.
In the installation, a series of thirteen lithographs of the Bill of Rights line the walls, starting with the original Bill, as it was passed in 1791. Each subsequent image shows the same Bill, but with clauses stripped and blotted out, and footnotes detailing the times each right was suspended. The rights are removed in the order of their first suspension, with the results being accumulative, transforming the images from a whole Bill of Rights to a redacted mass of writing, leaving only the less prominent freedoms untarnished. Providing a counter-point to the sentiments that excuse the erosion of our civil liberties is a cast lead hand and quill pen, writing out a long list of famous quotes holding that our freedom is more essential than our security, and that those willing to discard it for the hope of security, will have already lost what they intended to protect – the essential liberties upon which our country is founded.
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