Studio Diaries: My past visual diaries speak to the present disintegrations of the American dream

Energise Mr Ellis, drawings, photocopy, digitised photographs by Carl Gopalkrishnan 2005

This is a digitised visual diary entry I made in 2005 and later used in my paintings for a solo exhibition called The Assassination of Judy Garland back in 2013. I have a lot of sketches and studies which never seen to see the light of day, and I’m turning them into prints in some cases, or adding them into my studies of the present. This one was scribbled Energize Mr Ellis on a print I found in one of my files. It was about fragmenting materiality, or disintegration such as dropping something in an acid bath, in this case, myths of American exceptionalism which began to fragment from the first days of the Iraq war. I only found it because this shock fuschia colour jumped out when I was looking for something to add to my painting about our queer orientalisms.