0 USD

I made this work in the days after January 6, 2021. I remember the feeling precisely: not outrage exactly, but the particular vertigo of a belief system collapsing faster than you can account for it.

I had grown up in post-Soviet Ukraine with a picture of America that I now understand was a kind of mythology — democracy as an achieved thing, stable, self-correcting, essentially guaranteed. What I watched happen at the Capitol that day wasn't a deviation from that story. It was a revelation that the story had always been partly fiction. The costume slipped. Underneath it was something older and less flattering: a society as susceptible to manipulation, to manufactured grievance, to fascist theater, as any other. The exceptionalism was the lie. The fragility was always there.

At the same time, I was deep in the idealism of early cryptocurrency. I believed, with the earnestness of someone who should have known better, that decentralized money was a genuine rupture. That it could route around the captured institutions, the rigged hierarchies, the dollar's monopoly on what value means. That transparency would replace opacity, and that the architecture of trust could be rebuilt from mathematics rather than from the goodwill of people who had every incentive to behave badly.

Both of those beliefs died over the course of the last five years.

0 USD is a fictional banknote — a zero-dollar bill designed with the obsessive detail of the real thing, where every element has been replaced with its true meaning. The portrait at the center is Trump making a face that captures, accidentally or not, exactly the expression of someone who has just discovered that power requires no legitimacy — only the willingness to claim it.

Looking at it now, five years on, I think I was wrong about what the work was doing. I thought I was making a critique of Trump, of the dollar, of the captured state. But what I was actually making was a record of my own disillusionment — with American democracy as an ideal, yes, but more specifically with the idea that any of these systems are what they say they are. The dollar isn't a measurement of value. It's a claim about who controls the definition of value. Cryptocurrency turned out not to be an escape from that — it became another layer of the same game, now practically subordinate to the financial system it was supposed to replace, still denominated in the thing it was meant to abolish.

In 2021, I truly believed Trump was done, and the zero on the bill was meant to signal worthlessness. Now, in 2026, after a year of his second presidency — catastrophic both in terms of the damage already done and the damage still to come — I think the zero signals something slightly different: the null value of a promise that was never intended to be kept.