Friday, January 3, 2020

 





A few of my pieces at Jones Gallery in Kansas City.

Thursday, January 2, 2020

The Flood.
Mixed Media (watercolor, India ink, image transfers, cellophane, tissue paper, maps of Camp Lejeune, NC, markers, colored pencil, charcoal, gouache, and gold leaf) on Arches paper. 60” x 26”. 2020.

 I’m a wild, warm animal,
conceived in Camp Lejeune where Marines are
trained to kill and Always Faithful.
My parents drank and bathed in the solvent-contaminated groundwater as TCE, PCE, and vinyl chloride formed my tiny vessels like map lines.
Benzene is my mother.
I have never been without her.
A few miles away, through the tall pines and past the intercostal waterway, I swam in the ocean - my body clean and new, baptized in the churning waves.

This altarpiece triptych has been in the works passively for over a year (I think I started it, like, -geez- October of 2018). It contains an amalgam of symbolism connecting to different aspects of my childhood - early memories of wonder and awe, internalized religious fables, family stories - and the process of integrating my past with the present. The woman in the left panel is my mother; my daughter is on the right. This piece has been gestating for a long, long time and I finally let myself hear what she needed to say in order to be born.