Mapping Dissonance: America 2025

Mapping Dissonance: America 2025 is a visual archive of an extraordinary year.

This project began in January 2025 as an exploration of life increasingly lived through screens—AI absorbing our intellect, surveillance creeping into the everyday, loneliness compounding, a government indifferent to a warming planet. I wanted to witness the forces so difficult to make visible.

What I didn't anticipate was the seismic political shift that followed, or how completely it would upend my sense of America itself. I grew up in Georgia with a familiar story: that America, however imperfect, was always striving toward something better—a country that meant something beyond itself. In 2025, that story came undone.

"When the world feels chaotic, collage emerges," David Hockney observed. This work answers that call. The images are liminal: blurred photographs, fragmented figures, layers of media, erasure, and stitching—contemporary quilts of a fractured moment. Defamiliarization is the engine: repeating, inverting, and juxtaposing until the normalized becomes visible again. Political collage was born to reflect a complex, fractured, post-truth society back onto itself.

There is no conclusion here. Only a record of close attention—holding beauty and chaos together in the same frame.

And beginning to ask: what happens next?