CHASING ALICE | an origami installation

In 2018, I listened with deep unease to the Senate confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The testimony of Christine Blasey Ford was not just a painful reminder that trauma has no timeline, but that a person would be granted access to such an esteemed office despite the overwhelming evidence presented against his appointment.

Of course, we had already experienced this in the 2016 election. The confirmation hearings simply drove home the horrifying reality the past had no bearing on the present when it came to politics, and that an accusation of violent, criminal assault—believable as it was—was not only not enough to merit Kavanaugh’s dismissal from consideration, but that his confirmation to the highest judicial position in the country would be met with such unbridled glee from Trump himself.

I couldn’t help but think of Lewis Carroll’s character of the White Rabbit. In the Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” the rabbit entices young Alice to follow him down a rabbit hole, whereby she encounters a host of experiences and situations meant to test her character. But the rabbit tempts her by duplicitous means. By turns charismatic, sly, and fear-mongering, pompous, he is the quintessential narcissist. As I watched the hearings, I felt compelled to keep my hands busy, and found an online tutorial for folding origami rabbits.

Over the course of three weeks, I folded 1,461 white rabbits, one for each day of Trump’s presidential term. It was rigorous work—each rabbit took more than 20 folds to create. It helped ease the profound sense of disturbance I was feeling, not just in the moment of the hearings themselves, but the future that their result would lead to. And it provided a small comfort, as I made my way toward completion, to feel the days of this irreconcilable presidency diminish. 

We are now fast approaching the 2020 election, and I’m doing my own bit of counting down. With each passing day, I’ve marked one of each of the rabbits’ ears in red. It is a slight nod to the phrase, “Are your ears burning,” which means the feeling that one is being talked about, especially in their absence. In this case, the red indicates that the rabbits’ ears are bleeding, which is slang for an offensive or terrible noise. My hope is that Election Day signals and end to the divisiveness, havoc, unrest, and terror that Trump’s presidency has wreaked on our people, our country, and the world at large, and that the days of chasing Alice—toward confusion, conflict, and upheaval—will soon be over.