Shotgun Review Archive
How I Learned To… Weston Teruya & Michele Carlson
May 15, 2008 Everyone remembers sitting in a classroom, staring out the window, bored, distracted, or daydreaming. If you're lucky you also remember moments of getting swept away by a poem or an equation. Classrooms go with us, carried around in our heads long after we've left them--an imprint, the effects of which follow us silently the rest of our lives. Weston Teruya and Michele Carlson take a closer look at the personal and political implications of our educational spaces, transforming the gallery at Intersection for the Arts into a staged classroom that will induce a rush of personal memories for each spectator. All of us as former students have a shared vocabulary of the requisite layout and props--a phalanx of desks facing forward, the teacher's desk, walls lined with bookshelves, charts and an American flag. The framework for Teruya and Carlson's piece is Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a work that explores the lives of under-represented peoples in the U.S. Zinn designed a wall chart for the classroom, a timeline laid out in five pastel-colored rows punctuated by photos, stories and symbols of important events. Teruya and Carlson have recreated the chart, which runs in a mural around the gallery wall. The one difference with Teruya and Carlson's version is that it slowly devolves from orderly rows into an unruly tangle--a suggestion that perhaps histories can't be drawn in straight lines, but are more complex, messier.
