The DemoC(RAT)ic Process: A Solo Exhibition by Trei Ramsey
About the Exhibit
The DemoC(RAT)ic Process explores the aspirational, subversive, silly, and serious nature of our world through the District’s unofficial official mascot, The DC Rat. Originally created in 2017, The DC Rat is a tongue-in-cheek body of work portraying the resilience, adaptability, and ingenuity that remain the lifeblood of DC through its many iterations. The artist uses this character in familiar scenes and original takes to reflect on our past, present, and future. No matter how much you want to get rid of them, they find a way to survive and thrive.
The DemoC(RAT)ic Process features the largest collection of The DC Rat work, showcasing the artist’s process, what it means to reside in DC, and how democracy, our democratic process, and politics impact those who are just trying to live life everyday.
About the Artist: Trei Ramsey
Trei Ramsey is a self-taught multidisciplinary visual artist who works and lives in Washington D.C. He creates work that is described as powerful, colorful, and fun. Ramsey’s practice as an artist is inspired by his childhood obsession with Saturday morning cartoons, mythology, comic books, and western art history. Ramsey seeks to create a body of work that speaks to groups that are often ignored, by using the eclectic concepts he absorbed while growing up in America. To that end, Ramsey uses pop-art, surrealism, and cartooning to create work that looks or feels familiar but twists what is known to expose what is often hidden or purposefully relegated to obscurity: “it is like comfort food supplemented with essential vitamins, the equivalent of coating strong medicine with a chocolate shell.”
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