1 YEAR LATER is a multi-media installation conflating Robert Frank's "Covered Car, Long Beach, CA," Johnny Cash and Men in Black.

This project began with a parking shortage on the street where we live. We were trying to come up with a way to preserve the parking space in front of our house, when we hit upon the idea of a decoy covered car that we could fold up and put away when we came home. We turned to Robert Frank's photograph "Covered Car, Long Beach, CA" for inspiration in creating the decoy. Research into late 50's Cadillacs also led us to Men in Black, who drove them, then to Johnny Cash, who drove them, sang about them and was popularly known as the Man in Black.

The significance of title: while the Frank photo was shot in 1956 and appears to show a 1956 Cadillac, the car represented in the installation is a 1957 Cadillac. In 1957 Johnny Cash debuted at Grand Ole Opry wearing all black and "Cry, Cry, Cry" was released on Cash's first LP. The first Russian Sputnik launch in October 1957 was accompanied by a worldwide UFO wave.

The three men in the car are literally undercover. They represent Men in Black, purported government agents said to visit UFO witnesses in order to intimidate them into not reporting their sightings. They whisper along robotically to Johnny Cash's "Cry, Cry, Cry," the lyrics to which speak of surveillance, interrogation and threat, hallmarks of Cold War domestic intelligence operations. The Men in Black's logo, the all-seeing eye, is visible in the driver's side rear window and can be found on the dollar bill as part of the Great Seal as well as in the logo of DARPA's Total Information Awareness program.

The projection in the background and the inkjet palm trees were both lifted from Robert Frank's photograph and reconstructed using Photoshop. The layout of the installation suggests Photoshop layers and refers to the tenuous relationship between photography and truth, especially where UFO's and government intelligence are concerned.