The Truth is Powerful
Eli Valley, “Jerusalem Embassy Move” (2018) (image courtesy the artist and used with permission) I wouldn’t wish Eli Valley’s job on my worst enemy.
Picture yourself scrolling through your social media feeds and coming across a news story that makes your stomach turn. Not just something absurd or sickening, but something that gets deep under your skin — that fills you with rage and disgust, or makes you feel personally complicit in the grossest hypocrisy and venality. I assume that, like most people, this happens to you from time to time, and, in response, you do what everyone else does: You watch a cozy baking competition to distract from the distaste.
Valley digs right in. Not the way a critic or scholar might, to fill in context and explain what’s so objectionable. No, Valley gathers photos of the people involved — people he loathes — and spends dozens of hours, sometimes going without sleep, drawing painstaking, intricate caricatures of them. To put it simply: Valley has spent hundreds of hours looking at, thinking about, and making his own intricate representations of Donald Trump’s skin.
In a 2019 cartoon about the hypocrisy of Trump’s calling Rashida Tlaib’s use of profanity “a disgrace,” for […]