Daniel Edwards
Project 29: The MAGAnaut (2025)
Mixed media, cast resin, wood, iron, silicone, synthetic hair, and LED lighting

 

Daniel Edwards’s Project 29 is a monumental, speculative sculpture that imagines a dystopian third term for Donald Trump—not through democratic process, but through post-human preservation. At the center of this biomythic tableau is Trump’s severed head, encased in a translucent life-support chamber and grafted onto a dual-headed cyborg body fused from Elon Musk and RFK Jr.—figures emblematic of techno-futurism and fringe populism.

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The sculpture blends absurdist spectacle with classical monumentality. Clad in a stylized Tesla harness and thong, the hybrid body—part machine, part deity—is presented as a semi-nude MAGAnaut, a futuristic standard-bearer engineered for eternal relevance. With exaggerated musculature and a gleaming posterior, the work straddles satire and seduction, critique and cult worship.

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Edwards draws from real-world techno-political ventures—Neuralink, SpaceX, anti-vaccine rhetoric—to construct a world where power is maintained not by law but by mythology, machinery, and meme. An American flag transformed into a spear and a resurrected folk-hero squirrel named “Peanut” complete the tableau, invoking January 6 and viral culture in equal measure.

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Project 29 is not a memorial to the past but a provocation aimed squarely at the present—a meditation on the spectacle of power, the aesthetics of authoritarianism, and the surreal afterlife of political iconography in the age of social media and synthetic immortality.