PUSHED TO THE EDGE
In the spring of 2020, when NYC became an epicenter of the pandemic, life as we had known it ended. As COVID-19 spread across the globe, devastating every nation, the US started to derail completely. By summer, it became apparent that the US was heading into total chaos. A perfect storm was in the making with the upcoming presidential election approaching, the devastating effects of the pandemic, racial injustice, riots and high unemployment. With the nation on the brink, one would hope to find leadership in its government. Unfortunately, the leader of the free world was spinning in his own orbit.
As an artist I had to react to this moment in time. In August, I started the project Pushed To The Edge, a series of photomontages that explores the relationship between Donald Trump’s inner turmoil and his deeply unrealistic views of reality. I had decided against photojournalism as form of documentation, instead using the photomontage process to explore the skewed and often harmful perceptions of Donald Trump and his enablers. Originating in the media, my perceptions defined Donald Trump as a lonely character misplaced in space and void of joy.
The idea of space became important to me in this work: With his rhetoric and his actions, or lack thereof, Trump bulldozed civilized spaces and created the polarized environments that fostered chaos to erupt and unfold. In each photomontage, the space in which the characters play out their narrative is theatrical. I examine the distortion and exaggeration between the characters and the space, which echoes Trump’s own distorted view in his surroundings.
Pushed To The Edge is a record of how I, an artist living in the United States, documented this unthinkable time in which we found ourselves – in the hope that we will learn from it and resolve things differently in the future.
