Wake Up
Wake Up – Award-Winning Original Oil Painting | Political Art
“Wake Up is among my most significant works: a painting about who holds power, who writes history, and what we owe the truth.”
Wake Up is an original oil painting on canvas that reimagines Mount Rushmore as a monument to unchecked power. Four masked figures with mirrored lenses stand where presidential faces once appeared, reflecting a world burning, watched, and unraveling. Rooted in the Lakota history of the Six Grandfathers, this one-of-a-kind work is both a warning and a call to awaken. A powerful statement piece for collectors of contemporary political and social commentary art.
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$13,800.00
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Wake Up
Original Oil Painting on Canvas | 2025| 36×48 in | Signed by the artist
Wake Up is a symbolic oil painting that confronts the illusion of American exceptionalism in an age defined by artificial intelligence, climate crisis, and mass surveillance.
The Composition
Mount Rushmore looms in the background, but the carved presidential faces are gone. In their place, four masked figures stare out through mirrored lenses. They represent corporate power, government authority, the tech industry, and media control. In their reflective surfaces, a world burns, is watched, and unravels. The gas masks conceal humanity itself, reminding us that those who shape our reality so often hide their identities while doing it. Matrix-like symbols weave through the scene, evoking AI’s coded influence and the distortion of truth.
The Land Remembers
Before it was Mount Rushmore, the mountain was known to the Lakota as Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe (The Six Grandfathers), a sacred place violently taken and renamed as part of a broader effort to erase Indigenous presence and history. Beneath the painting’s imagery of collapse runs this deeper truth: the monument is built on a story that was buried, not resolved.
A Gesture of Hope
Amid the imagery of decay, the final figure on the right raises a hand to halt the bullets, a symbolic act to stop destruction and death. It is the painting’s pivotal moment, and its quiet argument that resistance is still possible.
Warning and Invitation
Wake Up is both a warning and an invitation. It asks whether we will remain passive within the illusion, or find the courage, individually and collectively, to stand, resist, and awaken.
Details
- Medium: Oil on canvas gallery wrapped
- Dimensions:36 x48 x2 inches
- Year: 2025
- Edition: Original, one of a kind
- Signed: Front/back
- Framing: Unframed
- Ships: [Professionally packed, insured, and tracked]
- Certificate of authenticity: Included
Who It’s For
Collectors of contemporary political and social commentary art, those drawn to work engaging Indigenous history and truth-telling, and anyone seeking a powerful original for a home, gallery, office, or institutional collection. This piece is meant to start conversations.
