When Victoria Dugger encountered Jasper Johns’ “Flag” during a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in 2024, she found herself contemplating similar ideas. The encaustic painting is one of Johns’ most recognizable works and revels in ambiguity: although it bears stars and stripes, it’s not an exact representation of Old Glory, nor is it solely a gestural, abstract work. Instead, “Flag” prompts questions about motif, material, and meaning that defy any singular narrative.
For Dugger, Johns’ multivalent approach felt particularly apt 70 years later. On the eve of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, she began a body of work that reflects a similar set of inquiries through the lens of Blackness, disability, and desire.
Freak Flags, on view this month at Sargent’s Daughters, reinterprets the United States flag through gingham, glitter, beads, fringe, and more. The title of the exhibition implicates the legacy of freak shows, which often exploited people with disabilities and diseases and presented them as odd curiosities. Spectacle takes a different form in Dugger’s mixed-media works, though, as she replaces stars with glittery tasseled pasties and lines the edges with vibrantly dyed locks of hair.
There are also miniature picket fences and curls of barbed wire woven throughout some of the compositions. While the former symbolizes the ideal of safety and suburbanization within the American Dream, the latter nods to a history of domination and discrimination from Manifest Destiny to Japanese internment to contemporary immigration practices along the southern border.
These sinister elements sit alongside fields of gouache flowers, dainty butterflies, and frilly piping. This complicated mishmash captures the fraught history and ideals that continue to shape American identity and policies. While some of Dugger’s flags are presented upright with the rectangular patch in the top left corner, others are flipped upside down, a long-utilized symbol of a nation in distress.
See Freak Flags through February 28. Keep up with Dugger’s work on Instagram.
