In June 2020, the United States felt like it was unraveling in real time. COVID-19 was tearing through the population, the killing of George Floyd had ignited the Black Lives Matter movement and widespread civil unrest, and violence was a fixture of the nightly news cycle. I made this piece for myself, as a way to process what I was watching unfold, and as a quiet piece of visual commentary on the state of a country that had started to resemble its own disaster movies.
The concept was simple: a movie theatre marquee advertising films that had crossed from fiction into something uncomfortably close to reality. Contagion stood in for the pandemic. The Purge: Anarchy captured the violence and social breakdown. The Road (the bleakest of the three) was slapped with a Coming Soon banner, the implication being that full societal collapse hadn't arrived yet, but the trajectory was hard to argue with. The bullet holes punched through the poster frames were a deliberate touch, as was the debris scattered across the ground: a torn BLM sign stained with blood, shell casings in the blood splatter, a discarded mask, litter (a small nod to the environmental neglect running quietly alongside everything else) and a shredded American flag.
The piece is a fully digital composite built entirely in Photoshop. The neon 2020 Now Playing sign was constructed from scratch, the brick wall sourced and integrated as the backdrop, and the movie posters composited into framed displays with intentional damage applied. It was shared on my personal social media page to a modest reaction, which felt appropriate; it wasn't made for an audience, it was made because I needed it to exist.
Looking back, the societal collapse didn't come. But the piece still reflects, honestly and accurately, what 2020 felt like.
DISCLAIMER: The movie posters featured in this image are the property of their respective studios and are used here for commentary and personal artistic purposes only. No commercial use is intended or implied.
