Reflections on It Will Destroy You
Empires rarely announce their endings. They decay. Slowly. Deliberately. Almost as if by design, repeating a self-destructive process of expanding beyond their seams, only to encounter the unavoidable reality of limitation. The notion that the average empire lasts roughly 250 years lives in the canon less as a statistic and more as a political omen, a warning against the cancerous consumption of human and natural environments. This timeline functions as a shorthand for the fallacy of capitalist inevitability. Whether or not it holds to the decade, the day, the hour, or the minute, our awareness of it persists.
We, subjects of this 249-year-old American project, walk the rumbling halls of a building on the brink. This empire, by all accounts, is barreling toward expiry. The current onslaught of violence, unrest, and political upheaval unfolds against a backdrop of absurdity and neo-colonial sentiment, gripping all inhabitants of this stolen land in a tension between collective submission and total revolution.
It Will Destroy You emerges from this moment not as a fatalistic declaration of collapse, but as an inquiry into what collapse feels like from the inside. The exhibition explores self-preservation and reconciliation within a nation defined by contradiction, one whose infrastructure aches for stability while capitalizing on insecurity. Rather than framing the American social experiment as a singular case study in systemic devastation, the works presented here situate it within a longer imperial arc characterized by extraction, enclosure, and the production of hierarchy.
Across the exhibition, artists return not simply to spectacle but to residue: the emotional, architectural, and psychological remnants of belief systems that have outlived their legitimacy. These works interrogate what is falling apart, what has been holding us together, and at what cost.
We begin from the premise that empire is built as much through belief as through law. Its authority depends on repetition, ritualized narratives that transform domination into dogma. Democracy becomes performance. Freedom becomes commodity. Violence becomes abstraction. Over time, these stories petrify into common sense, shaping how individuals understand themselves in relation to power even as the material conditions beneath them erode.
Several works in It Will Destroy You confront this architecture of belief directly, treating ideology as something spatial, inhabitable, and fragile. In paintings and installations where interior spaces appear staged, surveilled, or psychologically charged, viewers are drawn into environments that feel familiar yet unstable. Objects become symbols that refuse clarity.
Zach Dobbins and Sascha Huth, for instance, work with visual languages that hover between order and collapse, where structure persists just long enough to reveal its own inadequacy. Their compositions echo systems that insist on coherence while quietly unraveling, mirroring the experience of living within institutions that no longer protect but continue to discipline.
This tension between containment and exposure recurs throughout the exhibition. In these works, the architecture of landscapes, interiors, and human relations is never neutral. It is a record of values, a technology of belief. As belief falters, the systems built upon it follow suit.
While collapse is often imagined as external, visible in crumbling infrastructure or political breakdown, It Will Destroy You insists on its interior dimensions. Collapse lives in the body as dissonance, drawing attention to the widening gap between inherited narratives and lived experience. It manifests as anxiety, numbness, hypervigilance, and an exhausting demand for constant adaptation.
Several artists in the exhibition turn inward, mapping the psychological terrain of life under late-stage empire. Sophia Farmer and Michelle Alexander position intimate forms in the public sphere as a means of exposing the often unseen impacts of external pressure. They approach the body as an archive, marked by labor, expectation, and inherited trauma. Through gesture, material choice, and scale, their works suggest that the body remembers what systems attempt to erase. Survival here is not heroic. It is improvisational, often violent, and deeply contingent.
This exhibition makes space for artists reflecting on the codependent relationship between violence and empire. It considers exhibitionist acts of brutality alongside bureaucratic forms of violence that fade into the background of daily life. Borders harden. Resources are extracted. Labor is devalued. Entire populations are rendered disposable through policy, neglect, or narrative erasure. Over time, these violences become administratively invisible, even as their effects compound.
Artists such as Diada Amiri Jones and Deb Sokolow confront this normalization by restoring legibility and emotional weight to systems of harm. Each reintroduces points of personal or communal friction where numbness has taken hold. From subtle and humorous commentary on the dehumanization of corporate standards as an indictment to explicit stories about racialized experience, their works challenge passive viewing through accumulation, repetition, and strategic overload, compelling viewers to grapple with the banality of harm and its deep integration into the fabric of American society.
Ultimately, this exhibition situates the premise of destruction as a condition shaped by what we choose to make beyond institutional wreckage. Reconciling with ourselves amid hyper-local and transnational chaos is inseparable from the work of re-imagining shared futures.
The exhibition does not ask how to save a collapsing system. It asks how we want to exist in its aftermath. If empire is destined to fall, It Will Destroy You suggests that our task is not to salvage its remains, but to attend carefully to what is being born in its wake. We ask the viewer to step into this undertaking not with certainty, but with consideration, not alone, but in tandem, understanding that It Will Destroy You, unless…
