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Dance Dance Revolutions Co.
(a video in collaboration with End of Poverty by Ryan Kamstra, made of clips of teenagers dancing in their basements, all taken from Youtube)
by Margaux Williamson

When I first started making paintings, it seemed confusing that the high quality paints, the paints that are considered most “real” were made from pigments in the ground. It was a level of reality that seemed unnecessarily limiting, especially if you don’t have very much money and don’t like to mix colours. I thought a little bit about the colours we couldn’t see, and also wasn’t entirely convinced that the primary colours were actually primary. Now, though, I like so much that the colours in my paintings come from the ground. It seems of course a more tangible sort of reality than even the realism of representational paintings. I see it less like a limited palette and more like the only palette I could know, living on this earth – and the palette that I could get the most honest answers from.

A friend first directed me to Youtube in 2004. The first thing I looked up was “whales”. I really had a craving to look at some whales. And like everyone else, I went on from there. It all looked so much to me like a palette – just like the “real” high quality palette of pigments you get from the ground that I was at first so suspicious of. After years of thinking about small human gestures, I was able to see a bigger portion of that rainbow – completely undirected by me, and completely of our world.

My long-time friend and first collaborator, Ryan Kamstra, read a book by Jeffrey Sachs called The End of Poverty. Then he wrote a song called End of Poverty. Ryan’s song has a line in it that goes: You struggled so hard for a petty theft of affection / only to find – you’re totally ordinary. That line, and everything else about the song, made it clear that it was time to try out this new palette of ordinary human gestures. I focussed on basement hues and teenagers.