Reading Time: 6 mins
My practice now centers on photomontage — a bold, collage-based art form that assembles fragments of photos into visually striking, politically charged compositions. After decades of exploring a wide range of art forms, I’ve embraced photomontage as an exciting new direction for my work. Each piece is created entirely by hand, with no use of graphic-design software (e.g., Photoshop) or AI.
[Learn more about the artist and photomontage here.]
Foundation
This week’s photomontage centers on Signalgate, a stunning breach inside the Trump regime’s national security ranks. From March 11–15, 2025, a Signal group chat buzzed with talk of imminent U.S. military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. The participants were no less than VP JD Vance, senior White House staff, three Cabinet secretaries, and the directors of two intelligence agencies. The secrecy collapsed when National Security Advisor Mike Waltz mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg — editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and host of PBS’s Washington Week — to the conversation.
What followed was a stunning breach: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared classified details of upcoming airstrikes — aircraft types, missile loadouts, even launch times. CIA Director John Ratcliffe went further, exposing the name of an active undercover officer, while Vance and Hegseth mocked America’s European allies.
The montage also layers in other flashpoints from the week: Trump’s brazen hints at a third-term run in open defiance of the Constitution, and the Tesla Global Action Day protests. Together, these storylines form a tableau of arrogance, leakage, resistance, and fracture at the heart of the regime.
Interpretation
The scene is set at an unnamed Houthi site — possibly a residential block in the capital, Sanaa — bombed by American warplanes and naval forces between March 15 and May 6, 2025. Houthi-run media reported at least 53 dead and nearly 100 wounded in the initial strikes. Many more died as the conflict continued.
Framing this devastation are anti-Tesla, anti-Nazi, and pro-democracy protesters, part of the Tesla Global Action Day. They command both foreground and background, surrounding the dictator Trump and three senior intelligence and law enforcement officials: Kash Patel (FBI), wide-eyed and overwhelmed; Tulsi Gabbard (DNI), always two-faced; and John Ratcliffe (CIA), smirking at Hegseth in amusement. Their banners thrust grassroots resistance into the heart of the composition, underscoring how corporate power and authoritarian power are entwined, and how both must be confronted everywhere, all at once.
Trump looms in the wreckage, wearing a bold “Trump 2028” cap and brazenly invoking the possibility of a third term — a standing violation of the Constitution. He salutes his lieutenants while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, drink in one hand and flashing a peace sign with the other, presides like a reckless showman over the fallout of Signalgate.
The ghostly image of Mussolini looms behind Trump, a dictator from another era, degraded into black and white, yet still casting a shadow…and a watchful eye…over the American dictator. His presence in the frame is less about nostalgia than warning: authoritarianism doesn’t vanish; it lingers, waiting to be revived in new forms.
By colliding these elements, the photomontage distills the instability of the moment: a government unraveling at the seams, a leader toying with dictatorship, citizens striking back at oligarchs, and once-trusted institutions crumbling at the edges. It is not a single story but a collision of many: fracture, defiance, arrogance, and exposure all pressing into the same frame.
Artist’s Note
The Signalgate scandal and the bombed-out Houthi site are deliberately bound together in this montage. The same officials who leaked military plans in a careless Signal chat — Hegseth, Patel, Gabbard, Ratcliffe — are placed at the scene of their consequences: rubble in Sanaa. I wanted to make visible the violence exported abroad under the Trump regime, a violence too often kept out of sight. The ruins in the background are intentionally indistinct: they could be an apartment block, a school, or a marketplace — reminding us how civilian life gets flattened into military “targets.”
The protest banners are deliberately small compared to the size of Trump and his lieutenants, signifying that the resistance is still relatively small in numbers when set against the size and strength of the government and its security forces. But small does not mean weak. The resistance is decentralized, strategic, mobile, and able to outflank, surround, and hem them in. There’s power in that image: the suggestion that a counter-attack is possible, that even with only 3.5% of the population, the dictator can be boxed in.
Hegseth’s posture is the grotesque centerpiece: drink in one hand, flashing a peace sign with the other. I staged him as a reckless showman presiding over catastrophe, someone who treats war not as tragedy but as theater. His pose is meant to feel absurd and chilling at the same time; the casual levity of a man who can raise a glass while civilian lives are reduced to rubble.
I anchored the resistance in the small figure of a mother and daughter at a post office box. They are not loud or oversized, but ordinary, and that’s the point. They symbolize how daily civic acts, as simple as mailing a letter, are part of the struggle. Even in the face of collapse all around them, their presence reminds us that smart, street-level resistance often exists in quiet, with persistence, rather than scale.
Color and composition finish the story. The red of Trump’s cap bleeds into the blood-stained rubble behind him, tying his personal ambition to violence on the ground. The protest signs cut through in blues and reds, blacks and whites — small but piercing, a visual counterpoint to the heaviness of the scene. The arrangement keeps the eye circling from ruins, to regime, to resistance. Trump and a ghostly, black and white Mussolini dominate in size and stature, but the resistance is ever present, and should never be underestimated.
If this piece shook something in you, please subscribe and share, but also talk to your family, friends, and neighbors. This fight to save democracy ends when people stop engaging.
Artist’s Insights Archive
Week 9: Dismantling the Department of Education & Opponents
Week 8: Democracy’s Gilded Cage
Week 7: Congress Hosts The Dictator; The Resistance Tries To Be Seen
Powerful!! Yes, “confronted everywhere, all at once!”