Sunshine State
Steve McQueen’s first new artwork since his major commission Year 3 at Tate Britain in 2019, Sunshine State is a two-channel video projection shown on both sides of two screens placed one next to the other. Opening with footage of a burning sun, the work unfolds exploring images from the musical drama The Jazz Singer (1927), starring the famous singer Al Jolson. The film is known as the first "talkie" in the history of cinema that uses synchronised dialogue.
Summary
Sunshine State (2022) is not a conventional narrative film but a two-channel video artwork by Steve McQueen, projected across two screens placed side by side. Its visual and emotional starting point is an image of a blazing, almost oppressive sun. From there, McQueen turns to footage from The Jazz Singer (1927), the landmark Al Jolson musical often credited as the first feature-length “talkie,” and reshapes that material into a meditation on cinema, performance, race, and historical memory. The central figure is Jolson’s character, Jakie Rabinowitz—later known as Jack Robin—a young Jewish singer torn between his father’s religious expectations and his own ambition to perform popular music. Other important figures from the older film include his cantor father, Cantor Rabinowitz, his mother Sara, and the performer Mary Dale. Yet Sunshine State is less interested in retelling their story than in examining the images and cultural assumptions embedded in it. McQueen isolates, repeats, and reframes moments from The Jazz Singer, drawing attention to Jolson’s celebrated performance as well as its use of blackface and its complicated relationship to Black culture. The work’s two-screen structure creates a sense of doubling and disjunction, making the familiar footage feel both historical and newly unsettling. The contrast between the burning sun and the archival musical sequences suggests illumination, exposure, and heat, while also evoking the romanticized idea of a “sunshine state” and the racial histories concealed beneath such imagery. McQueen considers who is permitted to perform, whose identity can be borrowed, and how technological breakthroughs in popular entertainment may coexist with deeply troubling representations. Sunshine State ultimately operates as a critical conversation between early Hollywood and the present. It asks viewers to look beyond The Jazz Singer’s status as a technological milestone and consider the racial politics, fantasies, and exclusions that helped shape the medium from its earliest sound era. Its impact comes not from a conventional plot or resolution, but from the tension between admiration, discomfort, and reassessment that McQueen creates around one of cinema’s foundational screen performances.
