Godzilla vs. Mothman Exhibition Proposal
By: Justin Ho and Mieko Murao
Point Pleasant, West Virginia sustains as a home to the indigenous Mothman folklore and many other urban legends. Attended by more than seven thousand people every September, the Mothman Museum houses a grand Mothman festival, celebrating this mysterious entity in this humble, small town. This non-profit organization, accessible to the general public, serves as a cultural enrichment hotspot for West Virginia and a suitable space for the dialogue of fiction and reality. For all the wrong reasons, the Mothman Museum is regarded as an ideal space and institution for the upcoming covert exhibition Godzilla vs. Mothman, an undercovered, nonviolent interventionary intended to diffuse and dismantle the political mythology of race and the social folklore of skin color. With the fiction of the Mothman, the Mothman Museum will operate as a conversational vehicle for this exhibition to dispel the perceived realities of contemporary social constructs in relation to race and ethnicity.
This counter-reactionary discourse also aspired to target a larger audience of West Virginia, which according to statistics, ranks as the least diverse out of fifty states in terms of cultural, religious, and socio-economic diversity (Bernardo). A state that is the birthplace of two of the twenty-two active KKK organizations in the United States, a part of the original Thirteen Colonies, and a vital choke point between the North and the South during the American Civil War (Trimble). Additionally, the location of Point Pleasant also marks a historical bloodshed and land dispute known as the Battle of Point Pleasant, resulting in the deaths of estimated hundreds of Shawnee Native Americans (Sturn). The immense number of casualties for the Shawnee Native Americans could not be determined considering the Shawnee discharged their corpses into the Point Pleasant rivers as a religious ritual to honor their Native warriors. The carcasses of the Shawnee in the Battle of Point Pleasant emerged as the underlying foundation of what the infrastructure of Point Pleasant, West Virginia is erected on today. In addition, the exhibition Godzilla vs. Mothman employs the icons of Godzilla and Mothman to implicate the gravity of their genesis. The original 350-feet, pastel black Godzilla is created by the Japanese as a response of fear and terror against the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as a scolding denotation of the imperialistic, Eugenic attitude as an origin of World War II (Jacobson). In the comics of Godzilla serves as a necessary evil, an all-powerful monster that has destroyed Tokyo in several occasions as protected Tokyo from other monsters with the cooperation of his archenemy Mothra. According to a Mothman documentary named The Mothman Prophecies (2002), Mothman exists in the West Virginian folklore as a ten-feet Moth humanoid with glowing red eyes, often symbolizes as a sign of misfortune and tragedy(Muir). Sightings reports that the Mothman are seen before many major architectural collapses in West Virginia as well as leaving large Y-shaped claw marks on landscapes and architectures as a curse. Optimistically, the battle of these two icons will attract even more audience to the Mothman Museum and festival, pumping people with excitement and open-mindedness to see past the big picture of the exhibition.
In this collective space, the upcoming exhibition Godzilla vs. Mothman employs this detached access of the white cube to examine the roles of institutional dictums and cultural export in correlation with the political propaganda of race and skin color. Additionally, under this post-colonial, authoritarian structure, the contemporary spectacle engages in the nationalist objective behind the mythology of the quaternary race paradigm upon dissection. Eleven professionals and eleven indexical discourses, hidden in the exhibition, will expose the ideological inconsistency of racial compartmentalization under an atmosphere of unsuspecting viewers. Godzilla vs. Mothman will operate as an undercovered social practice exhibition, concealed under a comic themed facade, aims to subliminalize prominent artworks and discourses under less suspicious, indubious artworks, comics, and the annual Mothman festival. This softcore, seducing method of revolutionizing an institution from within, aspires to break the gap of cultural and socio-ideological differences one unit at a time under a laxed environment. Godzilla vs. Mothman intends to homogenize itself within the doped mythology of Mothman and personalize professional discourses for a tailored audience in a playful, dank manner, to dance in the haze of the Mothman party; a classy cultural espionage. Eleven professionals, intrinsically determined, to indirectly expound in details from their personal narratives in a serious, incognito fashion in an arousing atmosphere.
Angelica Dass, Humanae, Photography, 2012 – Present.
Humanae, by a Brazilian photographer named Angelica Dass, features an unceasing documentary of more than 4000 CMYK Pantone portrait photographs based innately on the skin color of the participants in more than 18 countries (Cascone). Humanae will disguise as a compilation of photographs near a photo booth machine during the Mothman festival, allowing viewers to introspect oneself via autonomous operation of the machine. Inspired by both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Dass’ polymeric portrait collection aims to dissolve the quaternary race system of white, black, yellow, and brown, while critique the establishment of white supremacy groups and president Donald Trump’s animosity towards illegal immigrants and Muslims (Lowe). Anatomically expressing the message of the “multicolored mass of humanity”, Dass objectively illustrates the diverse multiplicity and possibility of skin tone considering individuals of different ethnicities can share the same hue, disassembling the rigidity of stereotypes and social constructs. Currently settling in Brazil, the last country in the world to abolish slavery and human trafficking, Dass promotes the empowerment of all people by continuing to expand her Humanae photographic collection (Dass). By including Humanae as part of the Godzilla vs. Mothman, her message will further develop by means of the iconographic identity and introspective individualism through the collective discourses of the six remaining professionals.
Ronald Wimberly, Lighten Up, Comic and Illustration, 2015.
Lighten Up, by American comics artist Ronald Wimberly, analyzes how the portrayal of race, skin color, and gender interact in a macrosocial standard via the medium of a cartoon essay. Lighten Up Wimberly illustrates the subtle racial interpellation during the hexadecimal color construction of a character in a virtual, detached space, critiquing whiteness as an absence of race and racial paradigm as a synchronized misrepresentation (Bridges). Wimberly postulates the subcontext within hexadecimal system, rendering the color white as #FFFFFF and the color black as #000000, scrutinizing the dissimilarity in the digital signifers of color as a discourse of postmodern social literacy. Simulated as intervals between programme units, Wimberly raises the issue of editors filing complains about ‘skin tone correctness’ against characters with a skin tone spectrum of humans, while characters similar to She-Hulk, possess an unorthodox color of green, receive no further inspection. Reducing a dynamic ethnic group into a pixel of hexadecimal color confers to the commodified reproductivity of a linear, capitalist market, where fetishsizing a certain skin tone of a fictional character dominates all values of comic books. Lighten Up mobilizes the response of desaturation of skin tone and the over-articulation of race in the comics industry, an appropriate piece to facilitate the discourse of similar artworks within the Godzilla vs. Mothman collection.
damali ayo, Flesh Tone #1, Paintings, 2004.
damali ayo, The Paintmixers:Flesh Tone #1, Sound and Performance Art, 2004.
Flesh Tone #1, by an American conceptual performance artist domali ayo, commands to attention to the contrasting, interpretative micro-narratives of different artists, attempting to use paint-mixers to mix her skin color, by way of the diegetic sound documentation of her performance art (“BEHIND THE SCENES with Damali Ayo.”). After her interactions with the paint-mixers, damali ayo then fills the walls of a gallery with her supposed flesh tone, dampening the modernist principle of purity and institutional ideology of biological determinism. Under the artist’s permission, Godzilla vs. Mothman would like to display her Flesh Tone #1 paintings as back walls behind Mothman merchandises, as seen the image depicted above, while her The Paintmixers: Flesh Tone #1 will be remixed with contemporary Black trap music and pop samples in order to persuade viewers in a consumerist, psychological level. Via her experimental performance art, damali ayo reveals the postcolonial concept of race as a relative hypothesis, rather than an absolute truth of the human condition. Skin Tone #1 within Godzilla vs. Mothman will demonstrate empirically the human error in sensing and perception, as all of her supposed skin tone paint-mixes vary in lightness, saturation, and contrast, supplying evidence of the possible flaw in human judgment and the political foundation of race.
Orion Martin, X-Men of Color, Comic Book Series, 2014.
As part of Orion Martin’s project, X-Men of Color, he reimagines this famous X-Men cover by recoloring two characters as brown, recontextualizing the once familiar anti-heroes and superheroes with cognitive dissemblance. This cover originates from a storyline where the U.S. government sanctions for the capture and extermination of mutants and inhumans, a subtext for the foreseeable governmental attitude towards Muslim Americans today as well as past Eugenic-oriented regimes. Martin points to an observation that the X-Men comics have neglected to relate itself to the contemporary, multicultural society, where the cast of X-Men team has been mostly ethnically exclusive with a heteronormative, Eurocentric, male focus (Demby). Martin argues that the act of bringing forth civil rights-related struggles with an recolored cast allows the original targeted masses of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples. As Martin states that X-Men series have failed to stay true to its original intent, to accept and respect ‘mutants’ or people of all race, gender, and sexuality, while conversely, reinforce the said systematic discrimination and despotism against minorities. Furthermore, Martin advocates for equal representation of ethnicity in a form of mainstream media and cultural publication of the contemporary society, believing that this course of action will raise visibility in a dysfunctional blindspot of comic books. X-Men of Color will contribute aesthetically and phenomenologically to the themed exhibition, peeking out like a maple tree in a redwood forest.
Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin, Skin Color is an Illusion, American anthropologist, 2014
Gail McCormick, The Rainbow Sepia, Illustration, 2015.
Skin Color is an Illusion, by anthropologist Jablonski, compiles an anthropological research that orders skin colors by melanin, a dark-brown pigment in the human dermis, rather than by the social indoctrination of race. As opposed to the self-fulfilling prophecy for white supremacy, genetic determinism, and nationalist affirmation of ‘civilization’, Jablonski vocalizes the human evolution, climate, geography, and millennia of migration as the leading agent for the myriad of skin color. In this exhibition, anthropologists Jablonski and Chaplin will play a minor role in the Mothman Museum as cashiers and shopkeepers, interacting with unsuspecting viewers with camouflaged, loaded dialogues and replacing key words such as ‘skin tone’ and ‘race’ with words like ‘Godzilla’s scales’ or ‘nocturnal species’. Godzilla vs. Mothman will also include an illustration called The Sepia Rainbow, by American illustrator Gail McCormick, which exemplifies a map of skin colors according to Jablonski and George Chaplin’s research (Pacchioli). During Godzilla vs. Mothman , a large scale print of The Rainbow Sepia will simulate a playground map installed on a concrete ground near the Mothman Museum, as seen the image above, to masquerade the presence of the distinct illustration. Likewise, Jablonski’s dialogues will deinstall race as only an implantation of binary principles of Biblical text and the transatlantic slave trade by further stating that the concept of race simply does not exist in the realm of biology. As a way to destabilize the prejudiced dogma of skin color, Jablonski advocates for the term ‘dark-pigmented people’ in contrast of the crude lingo of ‘blacks’. Zealous to revolutionize the closedness and inaccessibility in the resources of public education, Jablonski’s comprehensive research will bolster the central integrity of Godzilla vs. Mothman.
Tomashi Jackson, Forever 21: The Essence of Innocence Suite, Film, 2015.
Inspired by Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, Forever 21: The Essence of Innocence Suite, by an American visual artist Tomashi Jackson, utilizes the semiotics of color theory and formalism to approach the issues of human rights legislation, racial segregation and resegregation, and institutional racism (Puleo). Under the artist’s consent, Jackson’s seven minute film collage will play in a 2.25 film speed, accompanied with preferably LED strobe lights and loud downtempo and witch house music at night, to occupy the space of the Mothman Museum in a collaborative, electrifying style. As a retrospective analysis on the language of the legal documents of racial segregation, Jackson negates the stiff signifieds of the word “colored” via a fluid depiction of color in her work. Also motivated by Brown v. Board of Education, Davis v. County School Board, and Sweatt v. Painter, Jackson portrays color as a constantly changing element as a way to undermine the post-segregation philosophy. With her intuition and devotion in Godzilla vs. Mothman, Jackson conducts colors as physio-psychological counter-subliminals to the 1950s educational and human rights policies, a conceptual weapon against the Eurocentric doctrine of purity and Eugenics.
Byron Kim, Synecdoche, Paintings, 1991-Present.
Synecdoche, by an American contemporary artist Bryon Kim, advances the collective and individual representation of race and identity with his 400 monochromatic panels of skin tone paintings of strangers, friends, and himself (McGlone). Synecdoche, under the artist’s permission, will inhabit as sidewalk floor tiles with transparent protective glass covers near the premise of the Mothman festival and the Mothman Museum, in order to cloak the true nature of the artwork. Kim’s Synecdoche familiarizes the symbiotic figure of speech of a part is a sum of the whole and a whole is a sum of the parts, suggesting that racial identities and color function as an e pluribus unum. The phrase e pluribus unum establishes the meaning of ‘from many, one’, operating as one of the influential mottos coined in a Great Seal back in the Thirteen Colonies and in America today (“E Pluribus Unum.”). This motto conveys a pluralistic signification, implying the singularity between the federal government and the states, where Kim now uses as a reformist mean to unite people of all ethnicities. Kim’s forward-thinking adoption of the Great Seal motto will play an integral, holistic role in Godzilla vs. Mothman.
Chitra Ganesh, Action Plan, Mixed Media, 2015.
Chitra Ganesh, Camera Contact, Mixed Media, 2015.
Camera Contact and Action Plan, by American visual artist Chitra Ganesh, manifests the beneficial notion of radicalism, protest, and political demonstration as a mean to expound the social stratification of race, feminism, and the human body (Cardwell). As a first-generation American, Ganesh feels responsible to also address the promising fantasy as a driving force behind many Indian immigrants. With the application of mixed media, sci-fi and mythpunk aesthetics, and a myriad of Hindu folklore, Ganesh alludes to a series of contemporary politics and perspectives as an ontological instrument, an altered state of consciousness, to express the obfuscation and concerns of the human experience. Ganesh anchors the narratives of her pieces in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian setting, negotiating the allegorical representation of time in place of the illusory present. The choice of settings signifies the unanimous political state in discussion of the attitude of equality, empathy, and sincerity towards race, gender, and sexuality, a large-scale ideological genocide against the oppressed. An Orwellian spectacle of standardizing the human hermeneutical experience, enforcing uniformity and linearity on the masses as a nuclear mode to uphold self-fulfilling nationalism and authority. Camera Contact and Action Plan strive to undertake and deconstruct this omnipotent institution by means of radicalization and recalcitrant protest to countermine the escalating crisis of intercultural extinction within the spatial sovereignty of Godzilla vs. Mothman.
Matthew A. Painter II, Malcolm D. Holmes, Jenna Bateman, Skin Tone, Race/Ethnicity, and Wealth Inequality among New Immigrants, Socio-statistical research, 2016.
Skin Tone, Race/Ethnicity, and Wealth Inequality among New Immigrants, by American sociologists Matthew A. Painter II, Malcolm D. Holmes, and Jenna Bateman, investigates and conducts a series of socio-statistical research to better understand the causal relationship between wealth inequality and skin tone among first-generation immigrants(Painter). In the Godzilla vs. Mothman exhibition, the socio-statistical research by Painter and his colleagues will serve as an easter egg within the Mothman Museum, where details of the research will sugar-coat as easter eggs with comic fonts and dance within the subtexts of comic book pages. Painter and his colleagues are also welcome to dress up as shopkeepers in the Mothman Museum or Mothman Festival, to interact with viewers in a more casual, indirect approach similar to Jablonski and Chaplin. Painter substantiates the social-cognitive theory of preference for whiteness by evaluating the liquid and illiquid assets between light-skinned and dark-skinned immigrants amidst different ethnicities, validating that even among white immigrants, darker skin tones still have a positive correlation with significant financial disadvantage compared with lighter skin tones. In a similar manner, by isolating skin tone as the only independent variable, this statistical difference in income disparity further disengages empirically when contrasting whites with asians, blacks, and latinos. Painter derives the conclusion that lighter skin tone in immigrants operates as a preconscious modifier that corresponds to the proximity of dominant white in-group, reinforcing positive stereotypes with preferential treatments. Whereas, darker skin tones in immigrants are associated as uneducated out-group, subjugated with the physicalization of negative stereotypes in employment and financial pay decisions. Painter’s research will contribute to Godzilla vs. Mothman, as a critique of the hierarchical racism and the mythology of race under the socio-psychological contexts.
Utagawa Yoshifuji, Americans Strolling About, Woodblock Print, 1861.
Fun fact! In the 19th century, Japanese once perceived European Americans as ‘darker, red skinned people’. Americans Strolling About, by Japanese printmaker Utagawa Yoshifuji, challenges the universalization of oppressor-blaming lens of racism with fresh perspectives. American Strolling About was created after the nullification of the Sakoku border, a Japanese isolationist foreign policy that barricaded foreign visitors from Japan for 220 years (Mills). In Godzilla vs. Mothman, Americans Strolling About will allocate as a comic book cover near the Ukiyo-E manga sections. When seen by a fresh pair of eyes, the woodblock print inquires viewers to interrogate the unary label of whiteness and purity, to examine the latent reasoning for such identification. The appeal for whiteness and fair skin exists in the Land of Rising Sun, as the woodblock print depicts the Japanese as having a lighter skin tone than European American, destabilizing and shifting the subjective singularity of skin color in relation to the transcultural sense of race. Utagawa’s woodblock print will expand the fixed racial formation and how isolationism in foreign policy may or may not affect the perception of ‘otherness’ on the population of the nation. Taking into the account of American isolationism in the 1930s and how this particular attitude affected immigration and domestic policy as well as on nationalism, enabling Godzilla vs. Mothman to approach racism from a kaleidoscopic, multicultural lens.
Kara Walker, Rise Up Ye Mighty Race, Mixed media, 2012.
Rise Up Ye Mighty Race, by American conceptual mixed media artist Kara Walker, illuminates the notion of the binary race war, slavery, sexual violence, and black nationalism through her 40 mixed media cutouts (“Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!”). Rise Up Ye Mighty Race can exhibit as a standalone without any additive camouflage within or outside the Mothman Museum, exposing this piece with its full strength and intention. Walker’s narrative-driven cutouts tells a reductive history of slavery back in the antebellum South as a counter-response to white nationalist William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (Potter). Using monochromatic shadow puppetry, Walker delineates the binary stereotypes and black-and-white perception against African Americans. While at the same time, Walker alludes to the element of shadow as a metaphysical common denominator, a signage of the universal suffering shared by all people of color. Assimilating Walker’s intersectional dialogues of power struggles, race, and gender into the space of Godzilla vs. Mothman will compose a connection between the past and the present.
Whether they are 4000 Pantone portrait photographs from Angelica Dass, 400 skin color paintings from Byron Kim, or 40 mixed media cutouts from Kara Walker, the mutual intention emphasizes the objectives of Godzilla vs. Mothman, to disrupt and provide a counter-narrative to the quaternary race paradigm and the post-colonial conventions about skin color. The curators of Godzilla vs. Mothman hope that by being persistent and consistent with the overall organization of this incognito intervention, the eleven similar artists and professionals will converge into a compelling, yet expansive singularity. The curators aspires to import the icons of Godzilla and Mothman as a way to assimilate the said ideals into the site of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The comics themed exhibition intends to appeal for the common man, woman, and children as well as for fans and believers of Mothman and Godzilla, to approach topics of racial discrimination in a non-confrontal, open-minded manner for both sides. In order to stand against hate and discrimination, the process requires the cooperation, strength, and unity of all people, regarding of dissimilar beliefs, without exclusivity of the unrepresented. And by clashing the local mascot Mothman with an internationally recognized monster Godzilla, their symbolisms will marry to override the many existing, binary disputes in America. Corresponding with the American motto Byron Kim’s work is centralized around, e pluribus unum or from many, one, this exhibition gathers people of all trades, anthropologists, sociologists, and a variety of artists to cross-examine the infrastructure of racism. By doing so, the curators of Godzilla vs. Mothman believe that this course of action will further inspire different people to speak up amongst the oppressed; teachers, historians, plumbers, soldiers, anyone and everyone. Considering in order for the discourse of this exhibition to become whole, voices of all people will need to act as the parts.
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Justin Ho 