Instillation view at the New York City Library 96th branch, January 2023

Instillation view at the New York City Library 96th branch, January 2023

Femmes Ensembles
BWAC
Red Hook, Brooklyn

“Someday All of This Will Be Over” isn’t intended to
merely be a direct, transparent response to the pandemic that came to our town in March 2020, but everything that I made as an artist after that watershed moment seemed to have reset my personal clock to the beginning of a new time period.

For the last several years, starting before the pandemic began, I have passed a small group of various homeless men and women along Madison Avenue and occasionally on benches along Fifth Avenue on my way walking to and from my job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I work as a security guard. Invariably, they would set up in the evening and by 9 in the morning the evidence of their night spent there had vanished. I found their temporary bedrooms inventive, resourceful, functional, and to my eyes, beautiful. Most of the time I never saw the person sleeping inside them--which nevertheless were very personal, individual, and varied in their appearance.

As an artist, I had always had a certain fondness and predilection for using found materials in my work, and the sight of these makeshift tent-like structures greatly moved and inspired me to create the piece I am exhibiting at Pioneer Works. Modeled on their examples, I have similarly built a tent-like structure made from leftover used plastic drop cloth, recently obtained from a small demolition site inside the Metropolitan Museum. Incorporating other found materials, the letters that I sewed onto the “flag” or “banner” were cut out from my old Met uniform pants, and the sticks used in the God’s eyes are pieces of driftwood I collected from the beach and branches from Central Park I found on my way to and from work.

Underneath the “tent” I have set up three TV monitors, placed on available tables and chairs from my studio,
playing an hour-plus-long video, begun at three different times and thus playing out of sync with each other, pieced together from many short clips I shot on my iPhone in the last six years. Many of the clips were shot more recently as part of a long-term ongoing project “On Break: Random Acts of Defiance in the Workplace” I have been producing while on break during my days working at the Met. Most or all of the other clips however were never shot with the intention of producing “art” or of doing anything with them later on, but, as in the case of vernacular photography, rather merely to capture some fleeting moment or scene at the time, for perhaps the sake of better remembering it or satisfying some momentary, short-lived interest or curiosity. But once I began to go through and view them again as a whole, in some cases many years later, I slowly realized that, as fragmentary and disconnected as they were, these short bits and pieces came together to make up a portrait of my life. I wanted to “house” the resulting portrait inside a temporary, makeshift, tent-like structure to point up the temporariness and fragility of life, made all the more apparent in the last year and a half by the pandemic.

Emilie Dopppelganger, a life-size doll of myself, completes the final chapter of her life. After years of working as a subject in photos, movies, and a play, she retires in a goodbye burning fitting of her compelling and beloved spirit that unfolded before the camera. She has been liberated from her earthly bonds.

Two homemade life-size dolls I created of myself and a friend, Emile and Nick Doppelgänger, get married, have sex, and produce a baby.Two years later the family spends a spring afternoon in Central Park, sitting under a cherry tree and miraculously fly a kite.

Video in process

"Trapeze Artist" Hand-sewn and stuffed painted canvas, Sharpie , fake fly, wooden ladder, metal leaf. The text on this bra describes the mating habits of the hanging fly. The image of a bra was inspired by a photograph I took of a real fly that had settled on the breast of another sculpture of mine. "Sexpot".

Sexpot was produced by drawing an outline with charcoal on two sheets of drop cloth, which were then hand-sewn together, trimmed, and stuffed with fiberfill and black foam. I then painted her with acrylic paint, and adorned her with earrings made from papier-mâché and metal leaf. She is over eight feet tall, and was inspired by Neolithic and ancient Greek artifacts.

This piece was inspired by the ancient greek funerary krater.

Spattered and drawn ink on paper using eyedropper; cut-out blossom is affixed to wood. Stem and leaves are cut out wood, painted with ink.

The figure and details of this drawing are appropriated from an ancient Greek funerary krater that I have frequently guarded at the Met. The mourner is surrounded by controlled spills and drips indicating tears or blood.

Video can be seen under "links" on this page

This piece is dedicated to Robert Rauschenberg, whose retrospective I guarded at the Metropolitan Museum in 2006. His combines inspired me to put my first light bulbs in my work. The “pedestal” of wine bottles and paint cans evokes alcohol’s reputation as a creative fuel.

I was inspired to save my beer caps out of a love of folk art I have seen over the years incorporating them. Every individual beer cap
in my piece I touched relays a story of time spent drinking alone or with others.