American Still life: Shots Fired (Limited Edition)

Hand-pulled 15 x 28.125” screen print. Printed on 290gsm Arches Rag paper with deckled edges. Edition of 20. Each print is signed and numbered. 

In the foreground, a table holds a family photograph — a life that achieved the American Dream — alongside a wristwatch frozen at the moment of confrontation, and a dying flower in a glass bottle. Beyond the table, a window opens onto the street.

Outside, masked ICE officers wrestle a man to the ground in broad daylight. The boundary between private life and state force is separated by a simple pane of glass.

Going after immigrants has become an excuse for putting masked, anonymous federal agents on the streets. It’s sold as immigration enforcement, but what it really does is normalize a cruel, violent, militarized presence inside American cities.

Watching Alex Pretti being shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis makes that hard to ignore. 

As these operations move off the border and into neighborhoods, workplaces, and protests, it stops looking like immigration and starts looking like an armed force meant to intimidate the American public under the cover of legal enforcement. And when the Law is abused, there is no accountability or consequences, just an ambiguous masked agent that disappears into the ether.

We're watching a scam in the making, the build-up to an election being stolen, and every day our rights are slowly slipping away. Fear of pushing back is spreading through America as we watch our friends and neighbors who stand up to corrupt power being punished, imprisoned, and now even killed.

Steven Miller stated, “We live in a world... that is governed by strength... by force... by power. These are the iron laws of the world”.

Here’s the question we must ask ourselves: Is this the world we want to live in? Is this our America? Who has the power? The many or the few?

—CP