The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce Doomscrolling, an exhibition of woodblock prints by the New York-based artists Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston to be held at its galleries in Reading, Vermont from 11 May – 1 December 2024. An addictive compulsion, doomscrolling is described as the act of spending an unintentionally excessive amount of time actively seeking out and reading negative or depressing news online. In this series of 18 woodblock prints, Sidhu and Swainston culled imagery from the mainstream media to depict 18 moments between 24 May 2020 and 6 January 2021. The date of each work is tied to now-iconic images and specific events, and altogether form a portrait of the United States during the time of Covid, Black Lives Matter protests, the events leading up to the 2020 election and the infamous day of the insurrection at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Like many of us, Sidhu and Swainston experienced life in 2020, a tumultuous period of isolation and political and social unrest, by consuming images and news on their smartphones. “We were just like everyone else, obsessed by consuming images of it. […] The show really comes out of our own ‘doomscrolling’ […] It was an experience of terror through viewing the media of it all.”