The Puppet Masters – Making Fools of Us All
David Haughton
January 4-27, 2024
Noon–5 pm Thursday, Friday & Saturday

Return to exhibition
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The Puppet Masters – Making Fools of Us All (2024) is intended to provoke thought, promote discussion, and send a warning. Six years ago, as an expatriate American, my horror at the rise of white nationalism compelled me to begin painting. My Angry White Men series portrayed the inchoate rage of unnamed men captured in photographs at rallies across the USA and throughout Europe. In depicting these frightening people, I had no intention of glorifying them, nor their beliefs. Rather, I was warning of the danger they posed. I hoped that I was exposing the underbelly of US and European society. My painted forebodings became reality January 6, 2020, nine months before the greatly expanded series was first exhibited in Vancouver, BC (October 2020).

Now, with another critical US election looming, I am returning to Seattle, with new and more frightening personal forebodings and urgent warnings – of unraveling of civil society and law, possible destruction of democracy, and even civil war. I offer a representative selection of the completed series that, I believe, clarifies in paint why things are falling apart.

I introduce two new protagonists. First, the Puppet Masters – cynical men who manipulate hatred for personal profit – and second, their Puppets – pathetically vulnerable men that are driven to commit lone-wolf violence. The Puppet Masters are the truly evil ones – the men who most need to be called to task by us: people like conservative media celebrities, Canadian far-right internet bloggers, radio & cable talk-show hosts, white supremacist leaders, and former American Presidents.

We are sleepwalking into dictatorship. The Puppet Masters are making fools of us all.
— David Aristotle Haughton

“Nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
—  James Baldwin

David A. Haughton was born in Philadelphia in 1956 and moved to Canada in 1991. Haughton has been exhibiting his work for 49 years, with solo shows in Zurich, Athens, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver, BC. His work hangs in over 350 private and corporate collections worldwide.