As a millennial, I was raised along-side a generation of peers optimized for “success and reward” first in school and then through secondary education. As a result of growing up in in a capitalist system obsessed with productivity, reaching goals, and climbing the “ladder of success” - my generation has inherited unique mental and physical challenges recently exacerbated by a global pandemic, crushing student loan debt, relentless assaults on human rights, unprecedented inflation, the decline of the middle class fueling the rise of the wealthy, decreasing job security, income polarization, abuse of human capitol, and fast growing inequality and inequity in the modern American capitalist structure and economy. The magical thinking often referred to as “The American Dream” is just that; a magical thought in today’s Americana for the millennial working class– both rural and urban.  The magical world I imagined as a child where all my dreams come true - if I just work hard enough - doesn’t exist, and never did for my generation.
 
Creating an uncomfortable space made of comfort objects, Succesful Trophies – I Did What They Told Me And I Don’t Feel A Thing (The American Dream) showcases a jumble of beheaded and mounted Disney, Dreamworks, and Universal Pictures plush characters from my formative childhood years and early adult years. The term “Trophy” has plural connotations: visually referencing a taxidermized animal trophy while also denoting an award for achievement. The beheaded character an assault on a soft and innocent object and the trophy as a marker of success establishes a symbolic dichotomy that aims to challenge learned perceptions of success vs. failure in contemporary American capitalism, and the engagement in production and consumption - the hunt - required to obtain this marketed product of success - The American Dream. In many ways, the Disney world, the Disney corporation, helped create the American middle class, market America, and eventually with new executives in power, played a central part in dismantling both in favor of profit over people setting the groundwork for the widening economic inequality that we see engulfing working-class Americans today. In this work, I am challenging my learned formula for success - the binaries of “success vs. failure / production vs. uselessness” - by consuming, destroying, dislocating, and reconfiguring treasured stuffed animals - my childhood reward for a “job well done.”
 
What does success look like to you? How do you assign value to people, labor, objects? Why? How can success be defined more equitably, and more humanely?