The Pig

The Pig is a confrontational collage that exposes the machinery of power, profit, and indifference embedded within contemporary systems of care and control. The surface is crowded with fragmented images of women—anonymous yet deeply personal—suggesting bodies that are scrutinized, managed, regulated, trafficked and burdened by forces beyond their choosing. Their presence speaks to vulnerability, resilience, and the disproportionate weight carried by women within medical, economic, political and bureaucratic systems.

Layered among these figures are medical bills and “letters of determination,” their impersonal language and rigid formatting cutting sharply through the composition. These documents function as artifacts of authority, reducing lived experience to codes, denials, and conditional approvals. Interspersed throughout the work is medical supply refuse from the COVID era—oxygen tubing, packaging, and disposable remnants—evidence of crisis, exhaustion, and the quiet accumulation of survival left behind by emergency and neglect alike.

At the center looms a giant pig’s head, grotesque and unmistakable, acting as both ringmaster and overseer. The pig directs the visual chaos, symbolizing unchecked greed, institutional appetite, and systems that feed on suffering while remaining insulated from consequence. Its dominance anchors the piece, drawing the viewer’s eye and implicating the structures it represents.

The phrase “let them eat Argentinian beef” cuts through the work with biting irony, reframing historical arrogance for a globalized, commodified world. It gestures toward abundance offered as distraction, luxury masking exploitation, and the widening distance between those who decide and those who endure.

Together, the imagery forms a dense, unsettling narrative: a critique of capitalism, healthcare bureaucracy, pandemic fallout, and gendered labor, all orchestrated by an insatiable central force. 

The Pig does not ask for comfort—it demands reckoning, confronting the viewer with the cost of systems designed to consume while appearing to provide.

2025, 20x30 on Illustration Board