Regan Rosburg

SO RICH

Gold decorative embellishments (as seen in the Oval Office) on a dumpster.

2025

My current body of work addresses the idea of the new “Gilded Age.” This term, repeatedly mentioned in speeches by the US president in 2025, references a time in American history between 1860 to 1890.

HISTORY

During the first “Gilded Age” period, the US experienced massive upheaval. Wealthy businessmen such as John D. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Jacob Astor, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and Leland Stanford were able to amass great wealth using exploitative business practices in their industries. In addition, they were ruthless in their treatment and destruction of the land — further perpetuating the caustic idea that man and nature are not only separate, but also that man has dominion over it.

The “Gilded Age” was a term coined by author Mark Twain in his book by the same name. Gilding means a thin layer of gold over a cheaper, less precious surface. The term was a critique of wealth accumulation and exploitative practices, highlighting the fake aristocracy that barely covered the criminal behavior below the surface.

CURRENT EVENTS

Ironically, and as if made for TV, the leader of the US has once again been promoting this idea. The decisions have, quite literally, metastasized the same widening wealth gap and natural resource extraction that embodied the first Gilded Age.

Now, however, the stakes are higher: climate change is upon us, mass migration due to conflict and dwindling resources is becoming a political reality, and ecosystems are collapsing. In 2025, the Gilding has taken the form of corporations (AI, surveillance, tech, resource extraction, pharmaceuticals, etc.), showing incomprehensible profits — pushing them further away from the reality that the rest of the globe faces.

MY WORK

In the original Gilded Age, the “robber barons” (wealthy elites) gave back in the form of philanthropy. This is not the case in this new Gilded Age. This new Gilded Age is saturated in the kind of collective social mania that Guy Debord warned us of in 1967 in his book, Society of the Spectacle.

This body of work uses the symbolic gold, baroque decorations found all over the current White House. Most of these gold decorative embellishments were purchased at my local Home Depot, and the same “gilded” look was literally re-created with the same method: a can of $8 spray paint.

For SO RICH, they are fastened to dumpsters and closed storefronts. For LAND GRAB, they have been photographed in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.