TRINITY FOR PRESIDENT aka Historical Campaign Poster Painting No. 3 (Manifest Destiny)

For this series, Kathryn Andrews examines connections between the media, pop culture, and politics. In TRINITY FOR PRESIDENT, she uses an 1848 image published by Currier & Ives, a New York-based printmaking firm popular throughout the United States in the nineteenth century for its affordable, mass-produced prints. The original lithograph depicts presidential candidate Lewis Cass (also called “General Gas”) as a war machine who used Manifest Destiny—the belief that the US was destined to spread democracy across North America—to justify his aggressive agenda. The new, enlarged image of Cass was screenprinted in white and blue onto two separate panels of painted aluminum.

Tucked into the work itself is a certified costume worn by the character Trinity in The Matrix, a 1999 science fiction film in which digital programs enslave humans in order to develop their virtual world. The costume’s tag reads “The Wild One,” recalling racist terms for Indigenous peoples oppressed by those who believed in Manifest Destiny, such as Cass. “Matrix” is also the term for any surface that carries the information for a print. The multiple layers of this work touch on how popular culture shapes public opinion and national identity, early prints’ role in turning news into entertainment, and the ability of the sensational and shiny to hide sinister realities.