Free popular-education coloring book, 2008

Drawing on her background in Art Education, Escobar addresses the determinative powers of potent ‘historical’ images, by conflating them with a coloring book aesthetic. All of the images she has re-represented are of iconic status and often emblematic of intensely complicated and critical events of socio-historical relevance. Through the mass distribution of socially-impactive illustrations, even if well-intentioned and of humanitarian concern, various interwoven and complex histories can be inappropriately cropped into just a few planar pictures. Our generally reinforced chronological tendencies then order these image-based concepts of historic significance, and place them in linear sequence; almost like they are dominoes. As though there is a direct and orderly progression of events, which fall one into the other with implicit seriality. As with these apparent paths of history, seemingly, laid out for us, within our personal and communal identities, there grows a determinist sensibility. Perhaps instead of limiting the understanding of a picture as being “worth a thousand words,” they can also be recognized as only particular points of reference; useful for demarcating a complex web of history, but not clear trajectories for some one, preordained future. – seeNoga