2017 25”w, 23”h collage
In this work, the artist utilized news of the recent unrest on the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa/al-Haram ash-Sharif to provide a setting for excavated spinner relics. Fine often combines images, ideas, and sources to invent her collages. A fidget spinner is a toy like a yo-yo and other skill toys. It became extremely popular this past summer. The Fidget Spinner was designed to spin with little effort and consists of a ball bearing in the center of a multi-lobed flat structure made from metal or plastic designed to spin along its axis with little effort. A version of the toy was invented as early as 1993 by Catherine Hettinger, who explained that she came up with the idea during a trip to Israel in the 1980s, during the First Intifada, imagining it as a toy that would distract Palestinian youth from throwing rocks at Israeli security forces.” The artist is interested in the overlap between Hettinger’s goals and the American public’s involvement in the Arab-Israeli crisis. What does one do with the pent-up energy of a national movement when it is not being channeled into freedom? How do we safely fidget – and should we be fidgeting at all?”
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