Project Description

What is the ‘deal’ that American democracy offers the world today? Is American consumer culture replacing civic responsibility?

Chicky Meal is based on our citizen’s lost participation in American democracy. The commercial-slogan-title aims at exploring the pervasive American bargain-attitude, where today you don’t have to put in as much as you expect to get out of the world.

Exploring these questions with a growing sense of despair about the state of our country and inspired by Arundhati Roy’s famous lecture ‘Imperial Remix: Buy 1. Get 1 Free’, I went into the studio and began to develop this work. I drew on disparate sources, starting with an article about a KFC franchise in Karachi that was repeatedly bombed last year, and the cheerful, iconic advertisement found in English among the charred rubble that provides my title. I created a 22’ structure, pentagon shaped and viewed from above like an isolated American symbol. I added five American women in early-American dresses that I deconstructed and upon which I embroidered anti-American slogans like ‘Down with the Imperialists’, collected from demonstrations chanted in Iraq, Pakistan, Germany, and elsewhere. One of the performers wears a chicken mascot head, her dress is embroidered with the contemporary sentiment, “I said I was Canadian, while traveling abroad” and expresses another evasive method we currently use to avoid dealing with animosity. Above all these elements a bright neon sign flashes over the installation, spelling out ‘Come & Have a Chicky Meal, Cuz You’re Gonna Love This Deal.’

Chicky Meal was developed and shown in preview (October 25 - November 4, 2006) at:
Peak Performances/ Acts of Engagement at the Alexander Kasser Theater of Montclair State University.