Month: November 2022

The final outcome of the Triangulating project is a series of 120 images that span Kennedy’s life, presidency and death, which are printed on 7cm hexagons. After reflecting on both the Trump and Kennedy projects, I came to the conclusion that the concept I was exploring was nostalgia, both collective and personal.

The design of the project is meant to underscore this sentiment. The images are cropped to create empathy, to humanize, to allow viewers to peek behind the curtain and feel a shared connection – a sense of nostalgia for what was lost and what could have been.

The Kennedy project comes from a place of personal nostalgia – it was designed with a subjective point of view about the Kennedy presidency. In this sense it is very much the type of cultural artifact that Andrew Blauvelt talks about in his essay An Opening: Graphic Design’s Discursive Spaces. This project fulfills the idea of designer as historian – one whose own experiences and ideas color the outcome of the design.

The same can be said for the project on Trump – my idiosyncratic, peripatetic upbringing coming to light in a design predicated on a understanding of multiple cultures, languages and symbols. To my mind, the Trump project comes from a place of collective nostalgia because it exists in direct opposition to the ethno-nationalism that defines the Trump era. The work is rooted in a culture seen as less than by Trump and his supporters – an “other” – and rather than engage with the racist discourse and dog whistles, it uses its own coded language in return, changing the conversation to one of ridicule for the Trumpian worldview.

Going forward, both works are interesting anchors for a new project, one that weaves all of the threads of political discourse, history, image-making, curation and illustration, into a new narrative. It may very well still have to do with the American presidency, but I am also curious as to whether the process of making these works can be applied to an entirely new topic, such as classic films or television shows.

After spending several weeks thinking about Trump and his presidency, I was ready for a change of protagonist. For this project, I chose to look at Kennedy, a president whom I admire, and whose political ideals I share. I began by looking into his Presidential Library archive, wanting to work with archival images rather than illustrations this time.

In the first iteration of the project, I envisioned creating a book that would use archival images in unconventional ways.

That experiment turned out to be too esoteric, and did not communicate effectively the narrative I was trying to tell. So I went in the opposite direction and tried a more traditional approach using both text and images. The texts were chosen from contemporary fiction and non-fiction sources that felt appropriate to the image and also fed into the narrative of Kennedy’s life story.

This experiment felt too pedestrian and sentimental for the subject matter, so I decided to go back to simply using archival images. In the next iteration, I wanted to simulate the feeling of exploring an archive and created small booklets organized by keywords.

This also resulted in a prosaic outcome, one that was only helped by an accident with an electric guillotine. After printing, I was trimming the ends and one of the booklets slipped and was cut at a funny angle. Though completely unintentional, it gave me the idea of printing the images directly onto shapes which could then be arranged by viewers.

Following poor feedback after my last iteration of this project, I put it on hold over the summer. There was potential to develop the idea, but I was unsure where to take it and needed to put space between myself and the work for a few weeks to come back and look at it with a sharper focus.

The idea of turning the Trump years into Loteria cards came from my initial translation project, in which I translated the film Clueless. However, the cards in that case did not work because the film was too divorced from the intention of the cards – it felt less like a translation and more like an imposition – and while it was fun to make, it lacked the depth I was seeking.

Loteria is played much like bingo – each player has a 4 x 4 board and has to fill a certain space on it according to what is agreed at the beginning of the game (a column, a row, four corners, a diagonal, etc). The cards are picked by a “cantor,” who then has to say a short line or aphorism for each card that comes up. The fun in the game comes from the verbal abilities of the cantor, the better the pun they make they more fun the game.

In this iteration, I wanted the Trump cards to have depth because their meaning was coded into the meaning of the Loteria cards. This mirrored the way in which Trump’s language nearly always contains thinly veiled dog-whistles, but using Mexican puns and humor in return.

The Mexicans are experts at humorous word puns, there is no one better to create a savagely funny, perfect turn of phrase. It is a characteristic of their worldview and character, and I wanted the cards to intentionally reflect that understanding. Each card is meant to have multiple layers of meaning, some more obvious than others, but all speaking with a humor and wit typical of the Mexican lexicon and culture.

El sol, the sun. In the Loteria, the Sol card represents new beginnings, an idea Trump sold to Americans by running as an anti-Establishment candidate. His candidacy and presidency however, ushered in the beginning of something else entirely, a dark period in American politics and one that continues to loom large over the country as it faces down the long journey to the 2024 elections. In this card, Trump is turned into el “solazo,” the -azo at the end creating a negative connotation – the sun is too bright, it is too harsh, it is too hot. It also borrows from history, harkening back to Louis IV, the “Sun King,” the idea that the world revolves around one man an appropriate symbol of Trump’s ego.

La botella, the bottle. Some of the cards are simpler than others, and this is the case with the bottle. Here the Diet Coke is a symbol of Trump’s deep character flaw manifested as a lack of self restraint, an addiction, a compulsion – he famously drinks an average of 12 Diet Cokes per day.

La mano, the hand. This card is simply there to poke fun at Trump’s small hand making a recognizably Trumpian gesture.

La corona, the crown. This card avails itself of a play on words on coronavirus – the virus being the crowning failure of the Trump administration. In the Loteria the crown actually symbolizes the colonization of Mexico by Spain – a painful, tragic and traumatic time in Mexico’s history – an event with some similarities with the experience of the pandemic in the US.

El diablito, the devil. The verse that is said when the devil card appears is “de patas y cuernos espera su momento,” which roughly translates to the idea that the devil is waiting in the wings for his opportunity to do harm. There is no more apt parallel for this card than Don Jr.