Since 2020, I've come to realize that "normal" is a relative term. The status quo that so many hope to return to was built upon a well-concealed moral rot. Now it seeps out for everyone to see, but as a Black woman with a knowledge of American history, none of it shocks me.
These works are an explosive declaration of my rage, disgust, and frustration with the new horrors that emerge every day. Making art with toys is like play therapy with miniature replicas of the things that trouble me, small enough to hold in my hands. Using kitschy Americana tchotchkes subversively, my clashing juxtapositions are a visual representation of the dissonance of America, so lopsided, incongruent, and paradoxical.
A bald eagle perches proudly on a smoldering dumpster festooned with American flags. The contiguous United States are surrounded by oceans full of microplastics, their red, white and blue terrain covered in guns, apple pies, and a domestic supply of blond-haired, blue-eyed infants that cannot be replaced by the brown babies in the mouths of hungry sharks. Lady Liberty is imperiled by heavily armed secret police.
This series exposes the delusional grandiosity of American slogans, revealing the arrogance, narcissism, paranoia, and racism that render it the opposite of everything it claims to stand for.
'Murica!
I have so much contempt for Trump supporters. I hate their willful ignorance, their bigotry, their short-sightedness, their incompetence, their sadism. It is their fault that there has been nothing but chaos and destruction every day since our inauguration into Hell. They have nothing to offer the world but poor taste and worse judgement. Being Black, I don't know many, but of the few I do, two have abused women I care about. I resent them on a sub-atomic level for the misery that they have enabled and empowered and the malignancy they have inflicted upon us. Because of them I now find myself in an abusive relationship I never asked to be in. A tyrant with the audacity to decree by executive order that artists produce something patriotic for the 250th anniversary of the country he's destroying gets what he deserves.
I took this decorative Americana panel that was probably manufactured in China and embellished it subversively. An ocean full of microplastics. 50 shining stars. Aryan babies, guns, and apple pie. The domestic supply of white infants is protected by a barbed wire border while sharks devour brown babies. This is the country they want. This is 'Murica.
Land of the Free
America, Anathema
The dumpster fire has become a fitting symbol for this age of American history.
