Cady Noland has been called the “dark poet of the national unconscious” for her ability to exploit the physical and emotional debris of our culture. Noland’s installations highlight the ways in which public life is often constructed around ritualized images of pain, violence, and humiliation. The Big Slide is a stark, conceptual portrait of socio- political dysfunction. In her pairing of folded and crumpled American flags with a blind person’s cane, phone-cord boxes, or a high-reach pole, for instance, Noland juxtaposed a potent national symbol with comparatively disempowered emblems of mobility, probing, and contact.
