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“Columbus Chronicles is one print from Carl Beam’s ongoing Columbus Project. This is an enormous undertaking, incorporating prints, paintings, sculptures, performances, installations, and even a scaled-down replica of Columbus’s sailing ship, the Santa Maria. Since 1989, much of Beam’s work has focussed on reassessing the implications of the meeting between the cultures of the First Nations and Europe. In mainstream society, the “discovery” and “conquest” of North America for Spain in 1492 is celebrated as a momentous occasion in world history. These sentiments are not shared by many people of Native ancestry.
In the top left-hand corner of Columbus Chronicles, the word “Hiroshima” is stencilled over splashes of white paint. Below the blank white field hover portraits of Christopher Columbus and a Native American elder. Beam appears to be suggesting that imposing colonial rule on Native North Americans was as devastating as dropping the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945. For the indigenous nations, the arrival of Europeans caused thousands of deaths through disease and warfare, immense losses of land, and the demise of many parts of a vast cultural heritage. The five-dollar bill linking the two figures together symbolizes the motivation behind European expansion, and the costly price paid by the First Nations.
The images of the bee and the traffic light present another dimension of the work – Beam’s exploration of the dynamics between the natural, the technological, and the political environments. The traffic light represents our sign-regulated world, the bee our tendency to bow passively to habit and imposed political structure.”
I don’t agree with Carl’s take on the bee, but the traffic light metaphor I have always found chilling.
