March 11-April 15, 2022
Davis Gallery at Hobart and Wiliam Smith Colleges in Geneva NY
Vested: Interest Due offers an allegorical accounting of the acquisition and inheritance, plunder and punishment that characterizes American history. Its scenes are charged, and charge more. Episodic entries of violent possession, pervasive oppression, and persistent discrimination fill a visual ledger of an inequitable economy. Depictions both earnest and ironic alternate to create a double accounting. The tally keeps changing with narratives of uneasy purchase. There is no sum total; the balance may never be reconciled.
Five of our first seven presidents enslaved hundreds of people, institutionalizing free labor that generated personal profit and fed our unfathomable national prosperity. The constitutional heritage that our founding fathers forged is indeed foundational to today’s injustices. The system that served their interests still promotes political disenfranchisement, racism, property rights over human rights, and hypocritical rhetoric espousing democratic values. Willingly or unwillingly, we are all invested in this legacy.
The figures in Vested: Interest Due are drawn in dire conditions, suffering dilemmas of their own making or overcoming circumstances of their servitude. They occupy tableaux of reaping and yielding, exacting and extracting, whether in domestic or work spaces, distant fields and hospitals, or factories and classrooms. Subjects meant to yield, and whose yields only enrich others, become reapers of retribution and restitution. Those who insure their own privilege, through exclusive legal rights, become, in turn, subject to unflinching scrutiny.
Vested: Interest Due is an assessment. Calculated reform would leave us short. A reckoning is due.
A Body of Principles, 2021, Ink, gouache and distemper on paper, 57 x 114 inches
The fifth president James Monroe is decapitated—along with the mind that developed his eponymous doctrine. A doctrine is a body of principles. But the body of principals, people whose land, labor and lives were exploited, is primary. Their expropriated lands grow wheat for domestic and international trade, supplanting tobacco. Timing is everything in this field of reaping and harvesting.
Democratic values espoused for a minority were justifications to retain oligarchic privilege. By design, the ‘new world’ imported European aspirations for, and the inequities of, empire, along with furniture and jewelry. Elizabeth Monroe’s finery and her husband’s Bellangé furniture cascade and crumble, tassels quake, and the glaringly obvious is uncovered. Sheaves are still borne.