If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 2 at The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Since the mid-1980s, artist Tony Cokes has explored the nuances of race, politics, and American cultural identity with videos that collage found images, color theory, and pop music with textual extracts from a range of sources. If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 2 is a cross-section of the artist’s work over four decades, and includes two new commissions. The works in this show explore topics as various as the origins of techno, Aretha Franklin’s cultural legacy, the LA architect Paul Williams, and the use of pop music as a weapon of torture. Together, Cokes’s works assemble a panoramic and ambivalent impression of contemporary America, while interrogating the media’s role in manufacturing narratives and reinforcing structures of power.