Truth Lies And Super-8

These paintings about the most notorious assassination of the twentieth century of John F Kennedy were shown in London in 1997 under the title ‘Truth, Lies & Super-8’.

They were undertaken in a playful manner, playing fast and loose with the flourishing conspiracy theory industry which arose out of the assassination, but at the same time not forgetting how shocking was the event itself, now burned into the collective consciousness through the extraordinary Zapruder Super-8 film. The interpretations and theories built around this momentous event tell us as much about what people want to believe as about what actually happened, and seem to me comparable in its demands upon faith rather than fact as any religious belief. My approach was to start from the interpretation of photographic documentation, which when examined closely and under extreme enlargement, in the same manner, perhaps, as Michelangelo Antonioni’s film ‘Blow Up’, supposedly reveals lurking figures unseen to the naked eye. My examinations, albeit with a little graphic enhancement, clearly revealed a hitherto unnoticed figure lurking behind the stockade fence overlooking the grassy knoll, and also in one of the windows of the Texas School Book Depository. This figure seemed to bear a remarkable resemblance to the cartoon image of Mickey Mouse. My suspicions were further compounded upon discovering that Walt Disney had invented a cartoon character previously to the famous mouse, but closely resembling him, which was a rabbit called Oswald - also, strangely, the name of the alleged assassin of JFK.

View the paintings

See all Exhibitions