Before the Bath
All the time that we spent going about our business, slowly but surely a Trump presidency became inevitable.
Up until last year I was making paintings from family photos. Everything was about the past. I was only interested in looking backwards. I would go through bags of photos at my grandparents’ house, trying to find images that interested me. They were from another time: before I was born, before digital cameras, when I was a child, when my grandparents were young in the Ukraine, before September 11th, before I became scared of death. It was a time that was gone and I wasn’t ready to let go.
When politics were brought up I wasn’t very interested because I never felt affected personally. I didn’t think the work I was making was political or that politics mattered to me.
I was in High School on 23rd Street when September 11th happened. I remember being shocked, then scared, then lost — wanting very much to pretend it hadn’t happened. That day my best friend and her dad showed up on our doorstep covered in soot and in need of a shower. As a spoiled, comfortable teenaged New Yorker, I didn’t know whether to be scared or excited that my friend came to hang out. None of it made sense. And then the armory building, a few blocks from my house, and Union Square, where my friends and I would hang out after school, were covered with photos of missing people. A few months passed and the city seemed back to normal. We went on with our lives. College, grad school, the world of grown-ups.
When Trump was running for president it all became clear: The rich were getting richer, the environment was being destroyed, people were growing angry. All the time that we spent going about our business, this was all brewing, and slowly but surely a Trump presidency became inevitable.
About a year ago I stopped using my old photos and started looking at the present. My paintings are still very personal but what I want to focus on is my life right now, in this period of time . All work, in one way or another, is political. We are of our time and whether I like it or not, this is the world I am in now.
