Last week, moderators opened the presidential debate by asking if Americans are better off than they were four years ago. Those looking for a visceral answer to that question may find it in "Doomscrolling," a collaborative exhibition by Brooklyn artists Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston, on view through December 1 at the Hall Art Foundation in Reading. The show presents a powerful series of 18 woodblock prints based on media images that appeared from May 24, 2020, through January 6, 2021. The New York Times headline proclaiming, "U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS" is quickly followed by scenes of unrest after the murder of George Floyd. Images of national protests and violent police response are interspersed with others picturing the realities of COVID-19. We see the McCloskeys of St. Louis, Mo., threatening Black Lives Matter supporters; then-president Donald Trump holding up a Bible for a photo op after ordering protesters tear-gassed; Rudy Giuliani melting down at Four Seasons Total Landscaping; the fly on Mike Pence's head. Each of the prints is composed of many layered images in bright, saturated colors. All but one are 57 by 45 inches and vertically oriented, like the image on a phone. They are titled by date and sometimes by time, when more than one print represents the same day. Viewing them mimics the feeling of doomscrolling on a phone: seeing many images of the same event unfold in real time and being unable to make coherent sense of them beyond a feeling of momentous dread. During summer 2020, much of New York City was boarded up. At the duo's artist talk in July, Swainston recalled that he had been out taking photos of the empty city. "As a woodcut artist, I was looking at this, going, Look at all this plywood! It conceptually made sense: It was getting graffitied, it was getting covered, it was getting weathered — this plywood was witness to these events." Swainston and Sidhu wrote to institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art with a project proposal. When the museums opened back up, the artists received some 120 sheets of plywood, which they carved into the woodcut blocks for the series. The distressed material would normally be considered undesirable for printing, but here it introduced an element of chaos and unpredictability that made sense for the work. In…