Anti-Retro

In this screenprint, Andrea Carlson presents an “imagined non colonial landscape” as a critical reframing of the past. The title, Anti Retro, originates from a 1974 interview with Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, who theorized that power emerges from control over how knowledge is produced, shaped, and recorded. Here, Carlson introduces familiar images from classic Western films—cowboys, a horse and rider, a falling horse—to reveal the truth of the “Old West, ” a romanticized myth that masks the political and cultural ideologies behind the Euro American colonization of North America. By exposing these fraudulent narratives, Carlson asserts that popular (collective) memory demands a critical reappraisal.