Embracing Creative Transience: From Political Remix Video to Digital Collage

Abstract

In this essay, I explore my latest series of digital collages titled Notes and Narratives. These works utilize additive, subtractive, and substitutive remix strategies to integrate Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque paintings with visages of Donald Trump and his associates. The series appropriates historical masterworks to interrelate the theologico-political foundations of the original paintings with the political turbulence experienced under the Trump administration. 

Notes and Narratives foregrounds remix as a powerful and potent tool for disruption, change, and communication in the continuum of pedagogic praxes and remix studies. My previous artistic work was dedicated to creating political remix videos, and this body of work represents a fork in my creative practice. The immediacy of the collages draws upon intertextuality and remix strategies to reveal passionate polemical positions, positing contentious criticisms of the political leadership in the United States.