Fact Fake

Fact Fake was made in November 2019, while watching the House of Representatives impeachment hearings. What held my attention was not the testimony itself but the repetition — the same claims, the same counter-claims, stated again and again by both sides with equal conviction. I kept thinking about the illusory truth effect: the well-documented phenomenon in which repeated exposure to a statement makes it feel more true, regardless of whether it is. Repetition doesn't just persuade. It rewires. Given enough of it, we lose our footing on what we actually know.

The work enacts that process physically. Using a 1930s Royal 10 typewriter, I typed the words fact and fake over and over across several days, correcting mistakes with white-out — the fluid meant to restore accuracy, to fix the record. But applied again and again, the white-out doesn't clarify. It builds up, cracks, peels away. The act of correction becomes indistinguishable from damage. By the end, the words are still there — but only just.

Each series produced 25 images. The final work shows 9. The reduction is deliberate: enough to feel the transformation, not so much that it becomes a document. What the grid holds is the deterioration itself — the point at which fact and fake have been repeated so many times that the difference between them is no longer easy to see.

That difficulty is the work. What the viewer makes of it is their own.

Fact Fake is produced in a limited edition of 30.

Ocean View, DE – 2019