Artist’s Statement: I am a visual artist whose canvases and sculptures often replicate paintings and antiques from early American art history presented as ruined by devices associated with their historical significance: A Frederic Church iceberg painting is stabbed by harpoons, an Albert Bierstadt painting of the Sierras is riddled by gunfire, a George Washington portrait oozes and melts like the portrait of Dorian Gray. I have more recently begun writing memoir and magical realist fiction. When the pandemic hit, my art studio building in Manhattan closed and I was sheltered at home with few art supplies. Used to my daily art practice, I began writing three journal pages per day that described mundane domestic chores collapsed with catastrophic world news. After three months, I left the city to live upstate in the Catskills and spent large swaths of time alone in a mobile home, writing my journal entries and creating sculptures based on the writing. In the mobile home’s kitchen, an alternate universe began to appear as I made life-size replicas of the sink, stove, refrigerator, microwave, tea kettle, and mailbox out of cardboard and paper-mache, only to have them interacting with fantastical elements fashioned out of epoxy and paint. The horse head from a Robert E. Lee monument now dripped from the faucet, as racism infiltrated every home through the plumbing. A fourth of July cake with burning candles was nuked to explosion in the microwave, either from patriotic zeal or protest. The finished series of sculptures were shown in a gallery in NYC in Fall 2021. I wrote the final flash text to highlight some of the lines from the journal that sought to connect the sculptures in a coherent narrative.
