In Dahlia Bloomstone’s video piece Financial accessibility to calm our apocalyptic anxieties (2020), the artist explores how teeth and eye color are common indicators of poverty, malnutrition, and lack of social care for the vulnerable. The piece forces us to question the gross inadequacy of an American system that relies on charity and philanthropy to care for its citizens.
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Check out Dahlia Bloomstone’s Q+A.
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Dahlia Bloomstone is a Puerto Rican / American artist and second-year MFA at Hunter College with a BFA from Bard College. With some political urgency and a lightweight camcorder, she creates accessible video content that leads to difficult questions. Many of these questions investigate virtue in art, philanthropy culture, the selling of physical identity, memorializing familial systems, exposing private worlds, and even being a loser on the internet (and post-internet). She often uses role-play, pop culture vernacular, parody, animation, and artifice as conceptual devices. Most recently, her projects have included computer programming, allowing for close communication with browsers. Her videos usually end up on her favorite unifying and democratic platform, YouTube. Anyone can stumble upon “The Lonely Dancer (Censored Version),” or “Financial Accessibility to Calm our Apocalyptic Anxieties,” or “Finding My Identity Under the Guise of Selling Baked Goods for Puerto Rico,” and leave a comment that they did not enjoy the video.
