The Welfare Landscapes are paintings based on the images printed on different state public benefits debit cards, often called “EBT”. I’m interested in how states use banal landscape imagery as a normative identity as well as how the landscapes are touch-points of buying food and other necessities of life for millions of Americans. Particularly relevant to daily life during a global pandemic, when many more people relied on the American social safety net, these landscapes can represent both care for the public, institutional moralizing to the poor (or “truly needy” as coined by Ronald Regan), or both. The paintings also seek to contrast the richness of land and resources to land politics and the inequitable and often stigmatized conditions of life on a low-income.
