Shane Rocheleau

Issue 172

Lakeside (2022)

“I grew up knowing and spending time with my neighbors. I now look askance at too many of them, and too many return the gesture. It hurts. Physical communities are disintegrating, but maybe that's because the foundations of this nation were built on chattel slavery and genocide? Americans of all colors and creeds are suffering, bent by the weight of both economic inequality and hegemonic propaganda designed to pit us all against each other.

As a person whose politics are — by American standards — considered "radically leftist”, I need to find a way to understand and even commune with the person I’m loudly and clearly told I should demonize.”

Shane Rocheleau’s Lakeside reflects on the legacies of settler colonialism through photographs made in his home community, which he has found increasingly divided.. Rocheleau offers a narrative that is both compassionate and critical, that presents aging white men as the legacy of historic displacements even as they now find themselves displaced by gentrification. Lakeside asks the viewer to consider Rocheleau’s neighbors in the context of long histories of settlement and violence, represented by images of a handgun trigger, an arrow head, and a megalodon tooth, and in relation to the values that saturate American mass media as represented by Guns & Ammo and Playboy magazine. The installation here is drawn from and interprets the larger book, published by Gnomic Books.

Shane Rocheleau lives and works in Richmond, VA.
shanerocheleau.com | @shanerocheleau