Abraham Lincoln gave two inaugural addresses: the first was
given just before the American Civil War; the second was given
days before it ended. Three months after the second speech,
Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who was incensed
by Lincoln’s public support of voting rights for African-
Americans. The pressure of the bullet shot at close range into
Lincoln’s head was so powerful that his eyes violently projected
out of his sockets. In Brian Tolle’s second show at CRG Gallery,
he uses a porcelain white bust of the sixteenth president which
rests on a faux-granite log. The words of Lincoln’s two
inaugural orations are written on red, white and blue silk
ribbons and explode outwards from the bust’s eyes. Tolle fuses
Lincoln’s presidential prose with a grim biological fact to
highlight the aspects of his presidency that he is most
remembered for: his penchant for moving language (and its
subsequent effect on abolishing slavery) and his assassination.
This gesture is a play on our historical memory