TRY HARDER
Exhibited in the UB Art Department Gallery 2023
"Once Upon a Time in the 'So-Called West' #2"
exhibition view
"King Lazarus, the Monument is Fallen"
"N-Pain, N-Gain"
"Avenge the Blood of his Slaves"
This work, compiled over the last 6 years is an homage to location in
Place and Time. Playing off Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the Chronotope in
Literature. I am placing sculpture, as language, into conversation with
this linguistic tool to speak about our current condition. Personally
it is an analysis of navigation in general, moving across the Atlantic,
being both with my family and apart from them, the role of teaching,
and the issues of access highlighted by the Covid 19 pandemic.
Aesthetically, it is a look at mapping, technological evolutions,
tools of violence and survival, and the nuance of visibility and
invisibility. I am contrasting the notion of the "Ritual and
the Sacred" and their location between private and
public, as they travel through Walter Benjamin's
"Art Work in the Age of Technical Reproduction"
into bell hook's "Art on my Mind."
I thank the faculty and students of the SUNY Buffalo Department of Art.
Thanks to Whitney Kehl and Christopher Siano for install.
