Madeleine Soloway

This series is a visual chronicle of current U.S. political upheaval—a historical record made in real time. It examines the weaponization of language to sow discord and consolidate power. Quotations from political speeches, news reports, social media, and redacted government documents, including a redacted Epstein file, are superimposed onto objects worn on the body: hats, underwear, gas masks, sleeping masks. These pairings collapse distance between rhetoric and lived experience, revealing how power inscribes itself onto us.

Each object is encased in a gold, Baroque Louis XIV style frame, where opulence and decadence collide with corruption, erasure, and dehumanization. The redacted text becomes both evidence and absence — names erased, truth suppressed, accountability evaded.

By placing charged language onto intimate, bodily objects, the work insists that the political is not abstract. It lives on us, within us, around us. This is testimony: a record of how power speaks, how we engage with it, and how we absorb it. © 2026 Madeleine Soloway

“Catch Me If You Can” ©2026 Madeleine Soloway

“She Was In High School” © 2026 Madeleine Soloway

“Dunce Diplomacy” © 2026 Madeleine Soloway

“Bearing Witness 2.0” ©2025 Madeleine Soloway This work chronicles daily political events and activities using hats and masks as visual signifiers, recording the different players in the moment.

“Cultural Heroin: Useful Tools” ©2025 Madeleine Soloway Antisemitism has escalated dramatically in the United States and around the world. Mainstream media outlets and right-wing influencers increasingly rely on sanitized language that masks and normalizes support for resurgent Hitler and Nazi ideologies. This work seeks to strip away that linguistic camouflage and confront the mechanisms through which hateful language is made socially acceptable.

“Everyone Is Vulnerable” © 2025 Madeleine Soloway

“Without Due Process We Are No Longer Civilized” © 2025 Madeleine Soloway

“The Children Are Watching” 2024-2025 In this series, I confront the charged intersection where private desire collides with public discourse. At a moment when disinformation and political extremism increasingly infiltrate even our most intimate spaces, I turn to the overlooked yet potent symbol of underwear, an everyday garment loaded with connotations of privacy, vulnerability, and exposure. By layering quotations directly sourced from political speeches, legacy media, and viral social media posts onto these intimate images, I reveal how language is weaponized to shape identity, inflame division, and erode our social fabric.
Through this work, I hope to spark dialogue about how we navigate a world in which our most personal choices and identities are increasingly entangled with, and vulnerable to, broader currents of disinformation, authoritarianism, and political / cultural upheaval. ©2025 Madeleine Soloway

In “Dating/Algorithms/Identity”, I examined dating websites as a way to look at identity. I looked at the language and the algorithms commonly used for online identity and their association with dating. The question raised were as follows: what keywords are used to self identify, what words are used to mold image, what words are used to group and categorized individuals, what reductive form of language is used to quickly identify and attract a potential mate, what words are used to market oneself. The goal of this piece to to raise questions about the objectification of language as it pertains to dating, identity and partnership. ©2025 Madeleine Soloway