jeffrey sass

Lives and works in St. Louis, MO

Artist statement

Our Country Is Currently Experiencing Technical Difficulties is a series of altered traditional darkroom photographs that examines political rupture through the visual language of television, memory, and technological failure. The work places images of the damage and disruption I associate with the Trump era within the framework of the 1960s television screen. Photographs are manipulated through darkroom processes, allowing the image to become unstable—to break apart, disappear, bleed, or resist clarity. Rather than treating the photograph as a fixed record, I use cyanotypes, text and paint to deepen the image and create a narrative space for the viewer. At the center of the series is the figure of Donald Trump, presented through a retro television test pattern. The test pattern was once a familiar image of interruption: a screen that appeared when programming stopped, when transmission failed, or when the viewer was waiting for something to return. Here, it becomes a metaphor for a country caught between signal and noise, information and distortion, and the dissolution of our civil and constitutional rights. By using the darkroom to physically disrupt recognizable images, I am interested in what happens when a familiar picture can no longer be trusted to remain stable. The work asks how political images shape collective memory, how repeated images become evidence, and what it means to witness a period of profound uncertainty through screens that are themselves becoming...

Artwork