On Art and Insurrection

Creating a work of art in response to a political/historical event is an interesting challenge. I wanted to respond to the kind of insane violence on January 6th by creating a sculpture that has a fractured form rather than a unified one. I had all the pieces of Osage Orange I had re-sawn already. I had an idea to create pieces that were sewn together and floating. The broken glass of the windows in the picture I took off of the TV was an opportunity to use those pieces. My biggest fear is that the sculpture will be misinterpreted as somehow glorifying that event. Which is ironic, since even when I was working on the piece months after January 6th I would feel almost nauseous and sad.  

Insurrection

Why Archives?

I thought my idea was original. Suddenly it seems whenever I listen to an artists talk or open a magazine, artists, Theaster Gates, for example, are talking about using or creating archives. But most of what I’ve seen involves collections. Mine are about images that have been collected for a specific site or artist. I started being interested in this idea when I was a visiting ‘Artist in Residence’ at Weir Farm, which is a National Historic Site in Connecticut. It was a residence of J. Alden Weir, an American Impressionist. He had a beautiful farm and studio, and he had parties with important visitors like John Singer Sargent and Albert Pinkham Ryder. There are great old pictures of artists at dinner parties that I used for the sculptures in the ‘work from archival photos’ section. My next project was for a show at Governors Island in New York. Smithsonian has a web site with pictures from the time it was a military base. The latest project is from an image from the Chaim Gross Foundation in New York. Gross made a film about his carving process, and the picture is a still from that filming.  

Soldiers Drilling, Governors Island

Letting the idea come to me; how it starts.

I was watching my favorite college Basketball team, The Hartford Hawks, and the announcer talked about how their best player had to not force the play, but wait for it to come to him. I like that as a metaphor for art, although I usually try to stay away from sports metaphors, they seem too easy. A lot of my work starts with an idea that comes from somewhere else or something else. Looking at photographs from archives is one source. I’ll say more about that in another blog. Travel is another source of ideas. The images of animals came from a safari in South Africa. It was an armchair safari, very controlled and protected, but the animals were real and exciting. ‘China’, ‘China Line’,  ‘Vegas’ use images from travel. Time passing finds its way into my work in different ways. The pieces that are a series of Photographs, such as ‘Stan Fishing', ‘Turkey’, ‘China Line’, ‘Timeline’, which are in the Relief Sculptures section of my site, all are about a sequence of time passing.

If you’re curious about a specific piece, send me an email and I’ll tell you its story.