Nancy Chunn

Hold These Truths

• Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear: Selected Index (Black), 2016
  Giclée print on canvas with acrylic paint
  30 x 30 inches
  Photo: Casey Dorobek
  Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Fox News, is the main target of Nancy Chunn’s Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear, a satirical series that repositions the paranoid bird as a paradigm for the post-9/11 culture of fear that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. In Chunn’s remix, the falling acorn is replaced by a television. In the flying sparks, she inserts visual quotations from news, advertising, clip art and cartoons, repeated and repackaged in different colors in an unrelenting regurgitation of sensationalism.

The recontextualization of a children’s book serves to amplify the infantilization of American culture, where fear-mongering and fake news often dominate conversations.