Published by Gnomic Book in 2024


2021—2024

Edition: 500
ISBN: 978-1-957301-06-8
128 pages, 62 plates
280x217x13mm, 747 grams
Swiss bound
Holographic foil embossed title
Essay by Brad Feuerhelm


2024.09.21-2024.11.02
Exhibited at Solas Gallery, Seattle, WA, USA


The Emergency Broadcast System interrupted American television from the 1960s through the 1990s. It was built to warn the public in the event of a nuclear attack. What aired was a sustained tone, a test pattern, a flat voice delivering procedural information. No emergency was ever named. The result was uncertainty. The interruption itself produced the fear and kept people watching, aware that the screen was always watching back.

That sense of interruption and uncertainty carries through This is a Test.

The project brings together Hi8 video stills drawn from 35 years of my family's recordings and photographs I made between 2019 and 2024. My family recorded itself the way many immigrant families did, trying to hold onto something while reaching toward something else, using the same screen that defined what American life was supposed to look like. Extracted and stilled, those recordings shift. They show my family moving through assimilation while the culture around them decided, continuously, whether they belonged.

The screen was never neutral. It broadcast an image of America and asked everyone watching to measure themselves against it. My family existed on both sides of that, behind the camera and in front of the screen, documenting a life while a system assigned value to it.

Looking at these images places the viewer in the same position the television produced, receiving a signal and deciding what it means, determining what fits and what does not. The static and degraded video are not aesthetic choices. They are the condition. Belonging did not arrive cleanly. It came through distortion, partial, requiring something to be filled in.

As political rhetoric targets immigrant communities and demands they justify their place in America, the work traces a longer continuity. The Emergency Broadcast System and contemporary discourse follow the same structure. Tune in. Pay attention. This belongs. This does not.

This is a Test holds on that condition, what it means to be seen through someone else's screen, and what gets decided in the static.