Jackie Neale is a portrait photographer, artist, curator, author, and educator. Bullet the Blue Sky is a series of distressed cyanotype flags symbolizing some embodied experiences of the false promises and contradictions of American culture.
Bullet the Blue Sky: Flag 3 is a representation of AR-15 and 9mm guns used to not only symbolize the American militia groups who, under the banner of the American Flag, operate without punity and are the guns often used in mass killings throughout the U.S., but also to represent the guns used flagrantly in the senseless killings of people of color throughout the U.S. Bullet the Blue Sky: Flag 5 – 37 Pregnancy Tests is a representation of the 36 months that I tried to become pregnant and the last month in which my husband left me. The pressures to have children are not only heavy and intense inside U.S. culture, but especially so within an Italian-American family. It is a philosophical undercurrent that women are meant to be mothers and take care of the home. It is this servitude, from my experience, that canonizes most Italian women into the family’s memories. I have been eliminated from this possibility.