PATMOS

Abstracting and collaging images from the last two US presidential elections with archival biblical illustrations, I tap into the angst of the current American political climate, magnifying both brazen and insidious forces.

Around the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections, I felt exhausted yet spellbound by the flood of media coverage. Compelled by a sense of dread and restlessness, I photographed the stream of images on my screen.

Emulating double-page spreads of a newspaper, television stills are collaged with 1950s biblical illustrations of the Apocalypse. Amplifying basic elements of mass media reproduction—LED pixels and halftone dots—I transform data through aggressive enlargement and physical manipulation during scanning. Signals become distorted, truth and meaning are stretched and skewed. The result is a fever dream evoking the religious fervor of politics, and reflecting an American landscape of paranoia, misinformation, injustice, and corruption.

In the Bible, Patmos is the island where John the Apostle was exiled and where he experienced his apocalyptic visions written in the Book of Revelation. I reimagine PATMOS as a space of contemporary reckoning—not of salvation, but of awakening—questioning the illusory notion of saviors. It is a place where spells cast are broken, and from the binary, new revelations emerge.