America 2024 arose out of a moment of recognition that we are all one, despite the ideas that seem to divide us. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. You experience love, loss, chaos, anger, fear, joy, wonder in your life. I do, too. We all do. The division is just a bloody idea, an artificial slash meant to divide us so we fall. The powers who seek to divide us know how bright and beautiful the truth can be. They prey on it and on us, engineering our fall through conspiracy to divide our nation. If it were an us-them question, the answer would be simple. The problem is, Wa are Them, perfectly united in creating this illusion of division. United We Stand…United in Division We Fall.
- Materials: Cotton, cotton-polyester thread, dye
- Series: NA
- Size: 32 inches x 21 inches (81 cm x 53 cm)
- Completed: 2024
- Current location: New Zone Gallery, Zone 4 All show
My Thoughts on the Work
This piece began with an inspired dye session. I’d wanted to play with using a glue resist and with these figure shapes. I was aiming for colors not quite as vivid as those I usually use with the idea of layering similar to the layers a painter applies to canvas.
As I worked, I kept returning to the idea of the ghosts of our lives. Democracy that’s being deconstructed. Freedom to choose how we use our own bodies that’s being fettered. Money that keeps us chained to jobs we don’t enjoy and lifestyles that are slowly killing our joy. I kept thinking about the ghost in the machine of our nation – that we as individuals (the ghosts) exist separately from the whole of our nation (the machine) and at the same time are an intragal part of that same machine. We are united in creating this world of division.
I was also thinking a great deal about the Abstract Expressionists, like Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner, Elaine DeKooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchel, and the rest of the New York artists of the late 40s and early 50s who sought to put what was deep inside themselves onto canvas without figurative reference to the stuff of the world. Their approach to abstract thinking and expression intrigues me, and as I worked on America 2024, I was looking to tap into that approach and see where it carried me.
