At 8 a.m. on MLK Day, Google greeted me with cartoon American flags and fireworks in honor of Donald Trump’s inauguration. I reflexively reoriented my attention by opening a recently banned app to receive another message: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” And amid my scrolling, I got some more backwards news: The Washington Post had undergone a rebranding by Jeff Bezos, editing their slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to read “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”
I was almost touched by Bezos’ homage to truth-telling: our country has indeed always been about packaging. Francis Scott Key’s “land of the free” lyrics are an ironic masterpiece; his poetry was a launching pad for an ever-expanding cultural landfill of lies.
I found an affirming salve to my routine screen addiction while visiting Paradigm Art Gallery this weekend, where artist Jedediah Morfit is showcasing a series of hard-wrought, fiberglass-reinforced plaster sculptures mocking American misconceptions as part of his exhibit, “Your Myths are Trash.”
The show puts on display the amount of time we waste conforming to trickle-down beliefs related to The American Way of Life.
The piece “Trash Fish” is a Christmas-colored, green and red print that pictures a new species of obese aquatic life that’s sprouted arms evolved to do nothing but cling onto a phone while shitting pills out of its tail end. More than speculative sci-fi, the artwork is a comic portrait of our collective psychology as desperados made brain dead by the ads for self-betterment that have been infused into the polluted air we drift through day in and day out.
“The Wages of Doing Everything Correctly is Still Death” is the title of a whitewashed pentagon illustrating the trappings of so-called domestic perfection. The commodification of the family unit rushes self-sacrifice into a soulless enterprise. The disengagement of a couple confined by normalcy is unveiled through Morfit’s obscuring eye, the faces of his subjects obscured through the kind of lazy paint job particular to slumlord apartments with orange flames poking out from behind the brush strokes.
A shirtless bro with a serpent lower-half sits atop a chain of casual violence in the sculpture, “I Worry About My Kids.” The human subject poses as the legendary “thinker,” chin rested upon fist and sunglasses lifted, as opposed to another phone-focused freak. He might represent the makers of our modern hell scape, looking forward into an empty distance, seemingly indifferent to the collection of animals choking to death underneath his snaky grip. A Mark Zuckerberg type, born from the fake news of Zeus himself.
The biggest joke made by Mordit is probably his piece, “The Artist is Present,” which pokes fun at the basic construct of a “creator.” A painter dashing hot pink over the letters “BEHOLD” simultaneously smears scarlet over his naked ass, ironically dressing up the bullshit he sells as art through lurid color schemes designed to grab attention.
Today, we all liken ourselves to artists; we’re tasked with packaging up our lives in aesthetic bows, desperate to reconcile the tensions between our interior complexities and our complicity in a contemporary economy of oversimplification. We’re not practiced in the hard work of extracting ourselves from an increasingly rapid snowballing of fiction.
Mordit has built his own world offline out of soft cement and the visual scraps of ancient storytelling — but the goal seems to be to establish an arena where we can confront the blurry lines that lie between art and garbage. His sculptures, afterall, are made out of a dumpster dive of cultural artifacts: Googly eyes, sunglasses and beanies, yarn, neon.
“I have always been a fan of fantasy,” Mordit writes in his artist statement. “It is a genre I define broadly — Mad Max and Marvel movies, certainly, but also stories by Stephen Milhauser, songs by Aesop Rock, Ukiyo-e prints by Yoshi Yoshi, or sculptures by David Altmejd.
“I am open to anything that puts a bright and unfamiliar wrapper around something plain and true... Like Perseus hunting the gorgon, it is often safer to look at demons through their reflections on a shield."
In the landscape of instant intellectual gratification, where cultural commentary is superficial across the board (take for instance, the immediate absurdity of internet memes), Morfit’s sardonic but elaborate repackaging of long-told lies re-empowers the shell of humanity to take precedent over the false content we’ve come to serve.
Happy inauguration day!
Absolutely beyond parody. pic.twitter.com/uLqFgfqxuq
— Trump’s Lies (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) January 19, 2025
