Electioneering
The ‘Electioneering’ series began over the summer of 2016 as collage experiments with kitschy napkins discovered on a New England vacation. I’ve always liked flags as emblems that convey information via simple graphics and pattern. After the 2016 Presidential election, I took up the incomplete works as a way to help process the results. I began integrating into the drawings the names of important artists (significant to both art history and myself) whose status, given their minority identities, is under threat from the new administration. This gesture was not about campaigning on their behalf, as much as it was about acknowledging my personal debt to their thought and works. As the series has progressed, and as we’ve moved further from the election, I’ve removed the totemic dedications in favor of a more radical transformation of the source material. The ‘Morning Deconstruction’ works are a formal exploration of the flag motif, in which the printed caricatures on the napkins are subjected to expressionistic gesture and process. My focus now is on integrating the concerns and energy of the series into my larger practice.