"How to Explain Electoral Politics Without Splitting Hares" Chad Scott
The cornerstone of Democracy rests upon free and fair elections. However, recent efforts are undermining the electoral process through misinformation, voter intimidation, and outright attempts to disenfranchise voters from their constitutional right to cast a ballot. Rather than ensuring voting is safe and accessible during a global pandemic, these efforts are Wagering Life and Gambling with Democracy, ultimately forcing voters to choose between risking their health or risking their ballot.
These efforts are the newest tactics in a long history of voter suppression within the U.S., which ranges from denying citizens the right to vote to providing insurmountable challenges to participate in the electoral process through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.
This performance installation responds to the current situation vis-à-vis historical antecedents of voter suppression. Prior to entering the exhibition space, visitors will be presented with a relic of the civil rights era—a literacy test—that was selectively used to disenfranchise voters. Viewers become participants upon their consent to complete a literacy test. No personally identifiable information will be included on the test. Completed literacy tests will be used for a future exhibition.
Chad Scott is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersections of politics, culture, and lived experience(s). He is particularly interested in the ways social structures and institutions shape and are shaped by individual and collective action. Recent projects have focused on the electoral process as a cultural event, civic discourse and participation as they relate to boundary antagonisms of analog and digital culture, and politics of space and place. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin, this approach may be described as “The work of [socially-engaged] art in the age of re[mix and post-]production.” This line of inquiry remixes and re-contextualizes past, present, and future aspects of social, cultural, and political phenomena.
Chad is currently an Artist-in-Residence with the Gayle A. Zeiter Literacy Development Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and served as the inaugural Art Educator-in-Residence with the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in 2019.
Chad has a PhD in Sociology from Texas A&M University, an MFA in studio art from the University of Houston, where he was awarded a Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fellowship in Sculpture, an MA and BA in Political Science from California State University, Sacramento/ Stanislaus.
