Sunshine State

Sunshine State (2022) is a video installation consisting of three elements: close-ups of a burning sun, fragments from the film The Jazz Singer (1927) and a recording of McQueen’s own voice. Playing in a thirty-minute loop, the work confronts the viewer with themes including identity, stereotyping and racism, interwoven with a personal family history.

The film opens with a bright sun, whose light both warms and burns. McQueen’s voice whispers: ‘Shine on me, Sunshine State, shine on me.’ He tells us about his father Philbert, who moved from his birthplace on the Caribbean island of Grenada to Florida in the ‘50s to find seasonal work picking oranges in the so-called ‘Sunshine State’. There, he became the victim of a racist attack which ended in the disappearance of two of Philbert’s acquaintances. Although McQueen repeats the story multiple times, he uses fewer words with every repetition. What remains are fragments of text – but when words fade away, silence, trauma and memory fill the space. 

McQueen juxtaposes this with clips from The Jazz Singer, the first film with spoken dialogue. Played by Al Jolson, the main character of this ‘talkie’, Jakie Rabinowitz, hopes to become a Broadway star. He performs in blackface – dark make-up intended to depict a Black person – just as Jolson did in real life. McQueen shows the footage in negative images, either slowed down or sped up, or played backwards. Black becomes white and white becomes black; the make-up becomes a ghostly mask. Jolson’s face dissolves into an intangible apparition.

In the gallery, the same scenes are displayed on two screens, in different versions and slightly out of synch with one another. The result is a sensory experience that effectively conveys the impact of a traumatic personal history. Through this fragmented retelling of his father’s memory, McQueen lets us see and feel the extent to which each of us is shaped by our own past.