Making (Up) History

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MAKING (UP) HISTORY
© 2017 Darrell Taylor All rights reserved.

All art is political, whether in supporting, contesting, or ignoring (colluding with) the status quo. This is a work of protest, celebrating the wisdom of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

I am not a photographer in the usual sense, but a “painter,” using digital images as my “medium” and software as my “brush”. I construct images in classic pictorial space (perspective, scale), using sometimes my own, but more often, recently, fragments of internet-available images, to build a virtual visual world—with sufficient implausibility to invite a surrealistic distancing, while motivating an “uncanny” familiarity. It is my hope that our era of television, advertising, and phone cameras provides unexplored means to turn the devaluing ubiquity of the image to the purposes of a critique of our media-saturated lives. I am tempted to say: we have enough images, so why not make art with the ones we have? This is nothing more or less than a digital assemblage of Google images.

The image is composed of several hundred individual pictures and picture fragments, combined into one image in Photoshop. The original image file weighs in at almost two gigabytes--28,200 pixels wide, by 6,600 pixels in height with more than a hundred layers active at any given stage of development. Printed at 300 dpi, the picture is eight feet wide. I have reduced the size here for web display.

This broadside satire of the Trump presidency is intended as a howl of protest against the least qualified, most destructive gang of cynical operatives ever to wield the enormous power of the American executive office. Spewing lies, trivial and misleading excuses, and pushing to unravel the web of protections afforded the citizenry by the Constitution, federal regulations and generations of benevolent precedent, this administration is essentially a right-wing coup d'etat, and could set in motion the destruction of the institutions and laws that have graced the American experience for hundreds of years. As the editors of the LA Times recently wrote: Trump is “a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation.” The editorial added: “nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck.”