Rachel Zaretsky: The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves (replica of a replica)

Exhibition Dates: July 18th to August 3rd, Friday to Sunday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment (Please email: info@humanresourcesla.com)

Opening Reception: Friday, July 18, 2025 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves (replica of a replica) is an exhibition that explores how public memory is shaped through objects, rituals, and acts of commemoration. Featuring new sculpture, video, and photography by Rachel Zaretsky, the exhibition considers how gestures of grief shift when filtered through repetition, spectacle, and consumer culture. It traces ephemeral expressions such as balloons at vigils, pennies tossed into fountains, or offerings left at war memorials as they become standardized within the American commemorative imaginary. Removed from their original contexts, these objects reappear as secular sacred symbols: proxies for headstones, plazas, and places of mourning.

At the center of the exhibition is The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves (replica of a replica), a dysfunctional mall fountain anchored by a fragmented plastic figure modeled after the gilded statue at the Americana at Brand mall, which itself replicates the original bronze monument at the American Cemetery in Normandy, France. Surrounded by oxidized pennies and mirrored coins, the sculpture compresses the iconography of monumentality and consumer display into a fractured, ornamental shell—interrogating how public memory becomes stylized, copied, and ultimately hollowed out through cycles of replication and visual consumption. Between a Memory and Record, a video essay, traces the bureaucratic afterlife of offerings collected at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. A photographic installation focuses on spontaneous memorials at sites of gun violence, isolating the recurring image of balloons, symbols that oscillate between mourning and celebration as circulated through news media.

The exhibition investigates how the performativity of mourning, when mediated through standardized forms and repeated display, can displace affective experience and transform acts of remembrance into indexable forms of public feeling. 

Rachel Zaretsky (b. 1993, Miami) is an artist based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in Art from the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design and her BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts in New York.