a year ago
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Posted On: September 20th 2025, 03:57 pm
𝙒𝙞𝙯𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙃𝙖𝙩
acrylic, graphite, crayon, pastel, gesso, cardboard, tape, found wooden banister
14'x8.5'xvariable
𝙒𝙞𝙯𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙃𝙖𝙩 stages the fantasy of magic as a political illusion. The image of the pointed hat, scattered with stars, suggests the childhood promise that anything can be conjured out of thin air. Yet in this work, the hat is unstable tilted, collapsing, patched with raw marks and fragile, murky surfaces. The bright stars glow like charms, but they read more as distractions than as protections: the promise of safety or progress dangled just out of reach, like the proverbial carrot on a stick.
This illusion parallels the American Dream as it has been sold in recent decades: an endlessly repeating spectacle of possibility that in reality keeps citizens chasing but never arriving. The “magic out of the hat” is not personal agency but someone else’s sleight of hand, a trick staged by political actors who control the stage itself. Under administrations like Trump’s—and mirrored in much fascist leaning rhetoric—the hat becomes less about wonder and more about manipulation, a prop for nationalist theater in which spectacle covers over the erosion of rights, media control, and the tightening grip of far-right power.
By translating this imagery into raw materials: graphite scratches, ghostly layers of paint, the precarious checkerboard installation overhead, the work exposes the upside-down reality that our lives may be structured by someone else’s conjuring. The magic we are told to believe in is not our own; it is manufactured, staged, and wielded to distract us while the foundations erode beneath our feet.
𝙒𝙞𝙯𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙃𝙖𝙩 unsettles this illusion by refusing polish and permanence. It asks what happens when we stop believing in the tricks, when we notice the scaffolding behind the show.
𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 & 𝘱𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘴
Klauzál6 Projekt Galéria
1072 Budapest
Klauzál tér 6
Budapest, Hungary
acrylic, graphite, crayon, pastel, gesso, cardboard, tape, found wooden banister
14'x8.5'xvariable
𝙒𝙞𝙯𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙃𝙖𝙩 stages the fantasy of magic as a political illusion. The image of the pointed hat, scattered with stars, suggests the childhood promise that anything can be conjured out of thin air. Yet in this work, the hat is unstable tilted, collapsing, patched with raw marks and fragile, murky surfaces. The bright stars glow like charms, but they read more as distractions than as protections: the promise of safety or progress dangled just out of reach, like the proverbial carrot on a stick.
This illusion parallels the American Dream as it has been sold in recent decades: an endlessly repeating spectacle of possibility that in reality keeps citizens chasing but never arriving. The “magic out of the hat” is not personal agency but someone else’s sleight of hand, a trick staged by political actors who control the stage itself. Under administrations like Trump’s—and mirrored in much fascist leaning rhetoric—the hat becomes less about wonder and more about manipulation, a prop for nationalist theater in which spectacle covers over the erosion of rights, media control, and the tightening grip of far-right power.
By translating this imagery into raw materials: graphite scratches, ghostly layers of paint, the precarious checkerboard installation overhead, the work exposes the upside-down reality that our lives may be structured by someone else’s conjuring. The magic we are told to believe in is not our own; it is manufactured, staged, and wielded to distract us while the foundations erode beneath our feet.
𝙒𝙞𝙯𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙃𝙖𝙩 unsettles this illusion by refusing polish and permanence. It asks what happens when we stop believing in the tricks, when we notice the scaffolding behind the show.
𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 & 𝘱𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘴
Klauzál6 Projekt Galéria
1072 Budapest
Klauzál tér 6
Budapest, Hungary
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