Cemetery Polka

Lemieux casts a jaundiced eye over the grand themes of civic life-war and patriotism, religion and sacrifice-from the perspective of one born into the swaggering confidence of postwar America and bred on the subsequent disillusionment of Vietnam and Watergate. In her photobased works, the artist used images from the 1940s and 1950s to devastating effect, exposing the historical amnesia of her own moment in the late 1980s with the very symbols that Ronald Reagan manipulated so deftly to erase the stain of Vietnam from collective memory.
Cemetery Polka (the title is taken from a song by Tom Waits) is an excellent example of Lemieux's ability to laminate the mordant onto the mirthful. The polka and polka dots like the ones that dance merrily across the surface of Lemieux's picture evoke the dance craze of the 1950s; they refer by extension to the polka king Lawrence Welk, whose fizzy "champagne" tunes (often accompanied by blowing bubbles that are echoed in the image's circular shapes) were a staple of the aging World War II generation. The dizzily pinwheeling shapes are filled with row upon row of cruciform grave-stones (distorted by a wide-angle lens): the reality of faceless, anonymous death reflected in the most ephemeral and festive of leisure pursuits.