March 2019

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When I first started making these shields, there were some specific worries on my mind.  I had a sense, as delusional as it was, that each piece I made would serve as protection for a particular individual.  This was in the context of a steady accretion of news coverage about unarmed black children, men, women being shot or otherwise brutalized, usually by police, for doing this or that normal thing that white people seem to be allowed to do but that people of color somehow look suspicious doing in this, our, America. 

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In this context, my sculptures were becoming more unambiguously shield-like in form and at the same time I was feeling a growing anxiety about the absurd futility of my occupation.  I wrote at the time “If these shields actually worked - if, like Spiderman’s suit, they fused to the body of the vulnerable and awakened superhuman strength and courage, - if there were actually something that I could build to give a kid wings, to amplify a small voice, then I would be obliged, and you would be obliged, to stop whatever it is we’re doing right now and mass-produce these things.”

But they don’t work.  And that bothers me.

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That was before this particular political climate, before this latest wave of greed, and wretchedness, and unveiled racism rolled in; before this current backlash, the calculated and systematic dismantling of the very few things left that seemed even remotely good or decent in the world.  

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And here I am, still making these things. They’re getting bigger, more and more elaborate, more delicate, and yet somehow no more effective at protecting good people from bad things.  I keep thinking there must be _something_ I can build.

These days I’m thinking more and more about the earth, about running out of time, about all that we stand to lose.  And these thoughts are showing up in the work.  There are now petals and branches emerging, creature-like limbs and riverbeds, stretched skin over ribcages or perhaps the skin-like webbing between the veins of a leaf.  Maybe I’m trying to make an army of earth avengers or creature-shaped prayers. Whatever it is that I’m building, it is clearly still an elaborate fantasy, one in which I am still hiding in my studio, still thinking I am the forger of a stockpile of armor fit for an uprising.