Jason File

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Single-channel digital video

Duration 6 min. 51 sec. (looped)

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“Jason File’s film traces the role of toilet paper in America and its global trading partners from 1960’s advertising to 1980–90s footage of TP’ing as a suburban ritual of celebration and pranking to darker contemporary news footage of consumers fighting over shortages. The film is set to a pre-9/11 song appropriated as an emblem of the conflation of underground cool and consumer ecstasy. The film is a spot-on critique of hysteria in American culture and the thin line between abundance and fearful hoarding.” — Curator Deric Carner, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NYC, Dread in the Eyes exhibition text