RED WHITE AND BLUE

Red white and blue is an ongoing body of work.

America is built on a set of idealized and recognizable forms.

The flag. The car. The courthouse. The church. The house. The main Street. The road. The road trip. The road signs. The motel. The gas station. The bar. The smoke shop. The liquor store…These are not just places or objects—they are cultural constructs, repeated across the landscape until they become symbols of identity.

In this series, Bahar Kural isolates these elements and treats them as archetypes. By stripping away context and replacing the sky with flat fields of color, the work removes them from reality and places them into a constructed visual space.

The images reflect a version of America that is both familiar and strangely detached—an environment shaped as much by representation as by lived experience. What appears recognizable begins to feel constructed, as if these places exist not only in the world, but in the collective imagination.

Within this landscape, unexpected juxtapositions quietly surface. The language of the armed forces appears alongside a manicure salon; symbols of power and discipline coexist with everyday consumption. At roadside stops, ice machines repeat with near-ritual consistency—ordinary, functional objects that become strangely emblematic through their persistence. These moments are not emphasized, but observed, revealing the subtle dissonances embedded within the visual fabric of American life.

By reducing each subject to its essential form, the work reveals a system built on repetition. The same structures, the same visual codes, the same promises—freedom, mobility, belonging—recur across different locations, reinforcing a shared but constructed identity.

There is no overt narrative and no direct critique. Instead, meaning emerges through stillness and distance. The images do not ask what America is, but how it is seen—and how those ways of seeing have been shaped over time.

In certain works, Kural introduces subtle framing devices—most notably the use of red, white, and blue—through which images associated with gun culture and individual freedom are held within a national visual structure. These compositions do not isolate or explain, but situate these elements within a broader field of identity, where language, belief, and symbolism become inseparable from the everyday.

What remains is a landscape of signs: precise, familiar, and quietly unresolved.