Optical Illusion installation created at Wassaic Project Residency, Wassaic, New York.
Dawn Woolley and Davin Watne, 2018
The text refers to the “Windrush” and “Dreamers” communities in the UK and the US respectively, whose citizenship has been under threat of revocation by current ruling governments.
The use of optical illusions demonstrates the fugitive nature of truth, by aligning the inherent biases in human visual perception with implicit social, political and racial biases in our news media.
The text is installed to replicate a visual distortion illusion in which the segments of different colour text trigger a visual stimulus that is misinterpreted by the brain, leading to the perception that the columns of text and curved. The illusion a of crooked line signifies a broken promise to the Windrush and Dreamers communities.