“Had some beautiful pictures taken in which I had a big smile on my face. I looked happy, I looked content, I looked like a very nice person, which in theory I am.”
— Donald J. Trump, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again.
Never in recent history has the American political landscape felt so polarized.
Two Face explores duplicity and manipulation, fiction and pageantry, production and spectacle in the theater of the 2016 Presidential campaign and beyond.
The work is inspired by Abramson’s experience of having traveled and performed with a New England circus in his teenage years, and also by images and stories from his regular childhood summer visits with his grandparents in Soviet Russia. Echoing Communist-era propaganda, Two Face brings into focus a blurry nexus of power, absurdity, and doublespeak.
These images all work to present fragments of reality, but they also reside within a space between wakefulness and nightmare. In constructing and deconstructing political dreamscapes, the work — rather than bearing witness — bears intuition and imagination.
“Praise the Almighty”
“Reyna y Guadalupe”
“Industry City Tango”
Free flowing thought bubble
“Gun show Randy”
“Liberty and Justice for all”
“Jeb!”
“The Ballad of Stevedore”
“Let them in”
RNC free flowing thought bubbles
“King in the Castle”
“Republican Panthers”
“Standing guard”
“Rebirth Bobby”
Florida primary free flowing though bubbles
“Strawberry pickers, forever"
“Great again”
"Fireball on Fifth Avenue”
“A great, beautiful”
“New Hampshire and beyond free flowing thought bubbles”
