Artist Timeline
Born in 1961, into a Cold War childhood shadowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation — a fear that never fully receded, only changed shape. By 1981, that same Cold War anxiety had intensified, joined by a new and quieter threat: the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and with it, a culture that responded with suspicion and blame rather than care. In 2001, the threat became domestic and immediate — September 11th, followed by two decades of war in the Middle East. By 2021, it was biological and global: COVID-19, arriving alongside a breakdown in family structure, a culture confined to bed and screen, and a public health crisis that curdled into outright distrust of science itself.
Taken together, these decades trace something like a return to an older, more fearful way of living — a new medieval era, where basic safety can no longer be assumed, where bunkers and self-sufficiency have crept back into the cultural imagination as reasonable responses to an unstable world.
The Disruption, Dislocation, and Disease. The Call Is Coming From the Inside.
Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds is a film returned to often — not for the spectacle, but for what it captures about a particular, ongoing anxiety. H.G. Wells wrote the original novel over a century ago, and there’s something eerily prescient in it: the Martians in the 2005 adaptation don’t arrive from the sky so much as emerge from beneath — machines buried and waiting, already here, already among us. It echoes an old horror-movie premise: the call is coming from inside the house.
That image feels apt for the present moment. American culture is currently consuming itself from within — polarized, fractured along political lines, turned inward against itself rather than facing any outside threat. No one is fully safe right now, and the danger isn’t some invading force from elsewhere. It’s already here.
The Collages
That’s the frame for the collages associated with the film: disruption, dislocation, and disease — not as three separate crises, but as one continuous condition, the atmosphere this body of work has been made inside of, a narrative of anxiety encouraging escape, to anywhere, and burrow. The atmosphere within these collages is intense, fraught with the fear of what comes next. Dark values and high-key colors pervade the visual narratives, offering no relief — only unrelenting fear.
