30.5" x 22.5"
We are in the midst of a moment of epochal transformation that started before Charlottesville with the demand that the landscape of American memory, embodied in figurative public monuments, be transformed through additions and erasures that correct historical erasures resulting in systematic biases extending into the present. We are thereby experiencing the greatest wave of iconoclasm in US History.
These latest works, many made in 2021, is perhaps an inevitable progression from the practice that I launched in 2013, modest plein-air drawings of figurative monuments near my home in Brooklyn. The latest studio works on paper are an unanticipated and anguished project originating with the blood of innocents.
Public monuments function to communicate collective memory that is sanctioned by those controlling memory space at particular points in time that are installed in central places. Most monuments are pastiches of selective memory blended with outright fictions that appear increasingly absurd as time passes. Brought into being in stone and metal, they often endure in central public places way past their expiration dates. Increasingly people are connecting these relics to the persistence of inequities enduring into the present and turn against extant monuments with astonishing intensity.