Shitshow - Rod Lathim

“Shitshow”

Vintage Tin Ceiling Tile, Neon

12 ½” W x 24 ½” L x 4” D

Mounted on an ornate vintage tin ceiling tile—stamped with patterns once meant to elevate the architecture of turn-of-the-century New York—this wall piece stages a collision between beauty and breakdown. Across the purple metal surface, freeform neon lettering spells the title of the piece, rendered in a playful, whimsical style and a carnivalesque palette of colors.

The humor is intentional—but so is the discomfort. The work functions as a political statement and a cultural mirror, pointing toward the chaos, dysfunction, and spectacle that have increasingly defined American governance and public life. By placing an obscene contemporary verdict onto a surface historically associated with dignity and craft, the piece asks what has happened to the ceiling of our democracy—what we once built to inspire, and what we now accept as “normal.”

Bright, funny, and unapologetically blunt, the sculpture turns neon into protest: a beautiful object carrying an ugly truth.