In the decade in which I was born, the majority of Americans decided that “greed was good.” Since then, nearly every time the United States has experienced some major moment when it could have reflected on this stance — the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, the 9/11 attacks, the 2008 recession and the subsequent Occupy Wall Street movement, Citizens United, the list goes on — the U.S. government has continued to uphold this belief, and the sentiment among the nation’s population only seems to be growing stronger. We recently decided to re-elect a fascist oligarch instead of electing a globalist cop. Either way, we were damned. Butnow, it’s mostly a question of how — how  much, for how long, etc.

This exhibition isn’t about the United States. It’s not about politics. It’s not about capitalism. At least not directly. It’s more so just about what it can so often feel like to live in a country whose government is controlled by and whose culture is  consumed by capitalism

— Keith J. Varadi, December 2024