Existing comment:
JUDITH PECK
State Collapse
Oil on panel
16 x 20 in.
Courtesy of Contemporary Gallery, Chicago, IL
ARTIST STATEMENT
"When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills -- a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public -- had gone untreated for years," wrote George Packer for The Atlantic in June 2020. The outbreak of COVID-19 revealed an emperor with no clothes in the United States: a nation whose response to a devastating crisis was more akin to that of a failed state than a superpower. The subject of State Collapse, with heavy-lidded eyes and body curled, is rendered immobile beneath the weight of this failure, buried by the helplessness and isolation so many Americans felt throughout the pandemic. |