Portraits after Calvary, Emory & Henry College, VA.
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Portraits After Calvary- Statement
Gettysburg, Antietam, and Manassas are three major battlefields located in the eastern theater of the Civil War, and battlefields I visited more than once among others in the summer of 2009. The experience left a deep impression on me, as did Ken Burn’s documentary series The Civil War did when I saw it for the first time as a child. It was reflective time in my life and I have since struggled to articulate that experience in subsequent drawings and prints. The parks were lovely and placid, and I spent many days in pastoral graveyards considering the bloody history of the war and its causes. The handsome landscape revealed the ugliness behind the war; deep seeded racism. I witnessed more traitorous Confederate flags and monuments than I care to ever see again, including the grave of Jefferson Davis littered with flowers, flags, and wreaths to celebrate his birthday. In those spaces, I spent that summer considering notions of survival and my own place in the world as a queer person.
The portraits, drawings, and collages that comprise Portraits After Calvary draw upon the notions of faith, renewal, forgiveness, and self-acceptance that I began to consider that summer which have never left me. In the studio, I explored and investigated these ideas via a queer lens. I wanted to create works of art that touched upon my lived experience, my relationship with god, and emotional response to the vast sea of political change we are all collectively encountering. I selected historical and cultural figures that were/are imperfect, brave, sometimes cruel, contradictory, and masculine.
Each piece exists in a distilled emotional landscape, fusing abstraction, portrait, and text. My working process in the studio was intuitive yet limited by theme and several recurring motifs. I began by creating an image bank with collected ephemera clipped and saved throughout the years. I recycled my battlefield drawings and explored various approaches to drawing pyramids, and walls. I used my experience working in a children’s library and exposure to great children’s illustrators to lead me to hand cut paper shapes and text and to include felt cut outs from flannel board stories into the work. I paid homage to modern and contemporary artists and the music of my generation via collage. In making choices about color, I thought of the vibrant tropical atmosphere of my hometown (Miami, FL), the patchwork of a Harlequin’s costume, and all the different possible ways identity or memory could be visually represented using my own formal vocabulary.
Portraits After Calvary is a body of work that exists in a personal, political space. The drawings were created and being finished amidst the reports of rioting and fascism in Charlottesville, in my home studio in south St. Louis, an area of the country deeply divided politically and racially in the wake of the Michael Brown Shooting, and recently, the Jason Stockley verdict. The narratives in the work intentionally refer to our current state as a nation, our bloody past, and what happens after the sacrifice.
2017
Gettysburg, Antietam, and Manassas are three major battlefields located in the eastern theater of the Civil War, and battlefields I visited more than once among others in the summer of 2009. The experience left a deep impression on me, as did Ken Burn’s documentary series The Civil War did when I saw it for the first time as a child. It was reflective time in my life and I have since struggled to articulate that experience in subsequent drawings and prints. The parks were lovely and placid, and I spent many days in pastoral graveyards considering the bloody history of the war and its causes. The handsome landscape revealed the ugliness behind the war; deep seeded racism. I witnessed more traitorous Confederate flags and monuments than I care to ever see again, including the grave of Jefferson Davis littered with flowers, flags, and wreaths to celebrate his birthday. In those spaces, I spent that summer considering notions of survival and my own place in the world as a queer person.
The portraits, drawings, and collages that comprise Portraits After Calvary draw upon the notions of faith, renewal, forgiveness, and self-acceptance that I began to consider that summer which have never left me. In the studio, I explored and investigated these ideas via a queer lens. I wanted to create works of art that touched upon my lived experience, my relationship with god, and emotional response to the vast sea of political change we are all collectively encountering. I selected historical and cultural figures that were/are imperfect, brave, sometimes cruel, contradictory, and masculine.
Each piece exists in a distilled emotional landscape, fusing abstraction, portrait, and text. My working process in the studio was intuitive yet limited by theme and several recurring motifs. I began by creating an image bank with collected ephemera clipped and saved throughout the years. I recycled my battlefield drawings and explored various approaches to drawing pyramids, and walls. I used my experience working in a children’s library and exposure to great children’s illustrators to lead me to hand cut paper shapes and text and to include felt cut outs from flannel board stories into the work. I paid homage to modern and contemporary artists and the music of my generation via collage. In making choices about color, I thought of the vibrant tropical atmosphere of my hometown (Miami, FL), the patchwork of a Harlequin’s costume, and all the different possible ways identity or memory could be visually represented using my own formal vocabulary.
Portraits After Calvary is a body of work that exists in a personal, political space. The drawings were created and being finished amidst the reports of rioting and fascism in Charlottesville, in my home studio in south St. Louis, an area of the country deeply divided politically and racially in the wake of the Michael Brown Shooting, and recently, the Jason Stockley verdict. The narratives in the work intentionally refer to our current state as a nation, our bloody past, and what happens after the sacrifice.
2017