12:14 PM

2023, Jeff Bezos bought a $500 million yacht and paid zero taxes on it. Millions of Americans are facing astronomically high rent and housing costs, while many properties sit vacant as “investments.” As of 2025, in 43 states, if you make more than $30 in tips a month, your minimum wage is $2.13 an hour, which hasn’t increased since 1991. Oh, and don’t forget to report your tips so you can be taxed on that as well. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have a combined wealth greater than the bottom half of Americans. These three men have become increasingly entangled in the U.S. government, echoing the elitist influence of socialites before the Great Depression and the French monarchy before the Revolution. In each of these historical moments, we see the powerful manipulate tax systems to extract wealth, until history shows that the public reaches a breaking point and reclaims power from the few who pretend to govern in their name.

By creating my sculpture from materials often seen as worthless, I want to critique the decline of the working class in an economy that increasingly favors the elite. I chose to depict a life-sized guillotine as a symbol of rebellion against this unchecked greed and to contrast historical systems with current events through a collage of news articles that partially cover the guillotine. The Statue of Liberty’s crown sits at the top of the guillotine to serve as a reminder that the statue, originally gifted by France as a symbol of freedom and revolution, no longer lives up to those ideals in today’s America. My title “12:14 PM” references the minute before Marie Antoinette’s execution, symbolic of the monarchy’s collapse and the resulting societal shifts. Consider how society lets wealth accumulate at the top while the working class struggles. Are we just going to sit back and watch it happen?