Me and My Ghosts
I am conjuring spirit characters that embody the notion of multigenerational trauma and the ghostly qualities of mental health issues we unwittingly inherit from our ancestors. Right before my eyes, family ghosts reach through the work with a writhing hand jive that shakes my ancient family tree from crown to root, where Confederates and Nazis have nested. My spirits recall the Hungry Ghosts of ancient Buddhist lore, who wander a parallel world, afflicted with insatiable desire, hunger, or thirst. After years of filing my ghosts away, I am now coaxing them out of my body during working seances, looking at these spirits for what they are, and listening to their murmurs about my own hungry, clinging hands. My outward practice of self-portraiture is merging with my latent ancestral characters to find lessons in my family "inheritance." While using my work to confront personal ghosts, I have been haunted by the parallels between family systems and the false narratives of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, where my history dances with our history.
I am conjuring spirit characters that embody the notion of multigenerational trauma and the ghostly qualities of mental health issues we unwittingly inherit from our ancestors. Right before my eyes, family ghosts reach through the work with a writhing hand jive that shakes my ancient family tree from crown to root, where Confederates and Nazis have nested. My spirits recall the Hungry Ghosts of ancient Buddhist lore, who wander a parallel world, afflicted with insatiable desire, hunger, or thirst. After years of filing my ghosts away, I am now coaxing them out of my body during working seances, looking at these spirits for what they are, and listening to their murmurs about my own hungry, clinging hands. My outward practice of self-portraiture is merging with my latent ancestral characters to find lessons in my family "inheritance." While using my work to confront personal ghosts, I have been haunted by the parallels between family systems and the false narratives of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, where my history dances with our history.
Portraits, 1984-Present
I have come to use realism as a practice of radical acceptance. People are a "ready-made" subject matter, everyday vessels of the magical, in-the-flesh palimpsests layered with multitudes of stories. Making portraits forces me to ask myself what exactly makes a person a person, and to study the subtleties that dissolve the unjustified generalities imposed upon groups of people. For several thousand years portraiture has brought the dead back to life and heightened the living. Across the millennia, we lock eyes with the regal gaze of a noblewoman from an Egyptian sarcophagus and wonder what her days were like. Ludwig Meidner’s foreboding self-portrait "My Night Visage" enables us to feel Europe’s psychic earthquake on the eve of The Great War. Rembrandt's lifetime of self-portraiture treats us to the unflinching scrutiny of a human face as it absorbs the unpredictable passage of time. As long as the work stays intact, it hands us our ticket to immortality, whispering across time, “Look at me, this is the way I was.”
The Year of the Virus: Selected Drawings, 2020
My sketchbook has kept me alive during the pandemic. I have turned to the mirror to check in with myself and used photos to have imaginary portrait sessions with missed friends, distant heroes, and even the monsters who are riding all the rotten chickens coming home to roost.
My sketchbook has kept me alive during the pandemic. I have turned to the mirror to check in with myself and used photos to have imaginary portrait sessions with missed friends, distant heroes, and even the monsters who are riding all the rotten chickens coming home to roost.
Waiting to Go Home, 2007
I have been building fires for my father this winter. I have also been doing portraits of my dad as he sits and watches the fires. He is living and leaving this life with Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that slowly but surely erases parts of him before our very eyes. The painting sessions last about two hours a day. He sits with his feet up under a cozy blanket in his den of thirty-three years but does not recognize it as his house. Every once in a while he asks my mom, “When are we gonna go home?” Doing these laptop gouache portraits has allowed me to connect with my dad at a time when his connection to his family and the objects in his universe is slowly fading away. This is my way of keeping him alive as long as I possibly can. This little series of drawings and paintings turns the quiet, private moments of our winter, his winter, into a reverberating, public experience. My dad was fearless in the arms of the public he no longer engages. He was the life of the party without even having to don a lamp shade. He was gregarious and robust, and sometimes acted like a bear. Now he sits, still, silent, and solemn, in front of the fires watching, waiting to “go home.”
January, 2007
Check out my book, Waiting to Go Home:
www.blurb.com/b/4061156
Dark Money, 2016-17
These ink drawings on dollar bills are about the role of money in politics and its threat to our democracy. I have chosen the already loaded surface of the dollar bill as a potent, "sacred ground" that has been tarnished, abused, and manipulated, much like our democracy under siege from international corporate interests. Each dollar bill, with its different degrees of darkness, communicates the secretive, opaque nature of money and power in the rising political swamp of our country.
The Trump Years
My Old Man and the Sea, 2010-14
Here I explore the archetype of the pirate, the reckless adventurer who battles monsters on the high seas of my subconscious.
Here I explore the archetype of the pirate, the reckless adventurer who battles monsters on the high seas of my subconscious.
A Fool's Paradise, 2005-09
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