We have not always been kind in the ways we have consumed the stories of real people through the media. Almost 50 years ago, media heiress Patty Hearst became a national sensation when members of the obscure guerilla group Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped and brainwashed the 19-year old undergraduate. For two years, tabloids reported every development of Hearst’s transformation from kidnapped victim to urban guerrilla. Artist Cady Noland scrutinizes the media’s influence on America’s collective history. Noland has silkscreened enlarged and distorted newspaper photographs of Hearst across the gleaming surface of an aluminum panel, drawing a comparison between Hearst’s apparent crisis of identity and loss of agency, and America’s own unsettled identity. Noland looks back at a massively publicized tabloid story that predicted what has since become a charged era of 24-hour news. The instant news spectacle is itself now a dangerous facet of American identity, and Noland confronts us with the compulsion in American culture to objectify individuals for entertainment value.