 Hello, I'm Barry Horwood. I'm the curator of decorative arts here at the Museum. By their very nature, period rooms are somewhat static. And so the curators have devised a scheme, and we've called them activations, to have contemporary artists insert their contemporary art to help enliven the rooms. The hall was an all-purpose room, and as you can see, the room is set up for socializing. One of the things I was really interested in with the period rooms is sort of the slippage between fact and fiction with the recreations. Some of the items may be historical, some may be recreated, some sort of interested in that play between what's real, what's factual, what's an approximation. For this activation, I made a recreation of Thomas Cole's painting called The Picnic, which is a very bucolic scene of some formal men and women picnicking under the trees on a beautiful day. So my recreation will be hanging over the mantle and look like it had been shot through with bullet holes, along with some of the furniture in here and some of the silverware will also look shot through with holes. And then at some point the viewer will discover there's a woodpecker somewhere in the room. This was the parlor, and it was a formal receiving room for important guests. I was interested in referring to American Indian wars and the conflicts that were going on at the time, sort of the atrocities going on. George Washington's head coming off is sort of a violent gesture. Maybe you can read into it many different things, but maybe a backlash from this idea of manifest destiny. And then the rug on the floor, the Indian pattern on it is probably made up. Most American Indian patterns we know were initially invented by the Pendleton wool company. So again, it's sort of like a stereotype of what might look like an American Indian pattern. We are standing in the Cane Acres Plantation House dining room. This room, very, very grand room comes from a plantation house that was in Somerville, South Carolina. This house was run and the plantation cultivated by slaves. So for my installation I've created a flock of 25 black crows that look like they're attacking a bounty of food on the plantation table and also recreated two still life paintings of fruit. The paintings and the table of fruit are being attacked by the crows, so there's this layer of aggression and violence going on in the room. To highlight maybe what was sort of going on behind the scenes that's not visible in such a very civilized looking, neat interior and maybe almost this revenge on the bounty that's presented for the plantation settlers that would be sitting at the tables.