American Still life: I Dream In Red (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. 

Hand-pulled 15 x 28.125” screen print. Printed on 290gsm Arches Rag paper with deckled edges. Edition of 35. Each print is signed and numbered. 

The curtains are pulled tight so only a thin line of light leaks through.

Beneath it is an arsenal: Kalashnikov rifles against the wall, magazines and handguns scattered across the floor, loose rounds shining in the dim light.

In a recent episode of The Daily, David Remnick described how authoritarian Iran maintains power not only through the military but through internal militias like the Basij—armed forces embedded within civilian life whose job is to control the population and crush dissent.

The people don’t have weapons.
The regime and its loyalists do.

The point is simple: weapons in the hands of a corrupt regime equal power.

Hearing that made me think about the constant arguments in America around the Second Amendment and our own revolution.

What exactly is tyranny in the United States?

Is it the same thing we condemn in other countries?

Is it cruelty and oppression against a population?
Is it the dismantling of free and fair elections?
Is it rule by fear and force?
Is it the breakdown of the rule of law?
Is it a government deploying loyal paramilitary forces inside its own country to control the population?

Recently those questions have started to feel less theoretical. The killing of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents during an immigration operation in Minneapolis has intensified scrutiny over the tactics and authority of those forces.

I’ve never liked guns because of the way fear, anger, and the desire for power can twist people’s psyches and push them toward desperate actions.

But it makes me wonder where the tipping point is in a society—when people feel abused, powerless, and backed into a corner.

And it raises another uncomfortable thought.

For years the loudest defenders of the Second Amendment claimed the purpose of those weapons was to resist tyranny—to protect the public from a government that might one day turn its power against its own people.

But now many of those same voices are silent.

Or worse, they’re the ones wearing the uniforms.

The people who once said the guns were meant to stop the paramilitary are now the paramilitary.

Which makes me wonder if the guns were ever really about freedom at all— or if they were always a vehicle for a power-hungry minority to seize it.

Power to the people.

—CP