Sarah Morris

Dulles (Capital), 2001

In her Capital-series, Sarah Morris offers visual experiences of contemporary urbanity. The painting Dulles (Capital) shows a detail from the façade of the International Airport in Washington D.C. A building representing the city’s power and prosperity as well as the omnipresent surveillance system. The painting is based on video stills and photographs taken by the artist, then she manipulates them on a computer to produce grid-like model images. The grid is applied to a monochrome ground and then taped over, and finally ‘colored in’ parcel by parcel. In the artistic processing, the icons of power reveal their coldness and abstractness to the world, and the transitions between politics, art and entertainment are blurred.