Wait Drawing

For the assassinated figures series, I first decided on a theme (I'd been thinking about Andy Warhol's so-called "Death and Destruction" series of the 1960s—how he created a complex ambiguity between critiquing our sordid fascination with death and fame while also, ironically, celebrating it), then I researched it, selected the images with strong compositions, and then set about refining a process of media layering (pencil, illustration marker, food dye, handmade walnut ink) and kinds of actions (tracing projected images, squeegeeing, brushing, scrubbing). With Conceptual Art and Conceptual Writing traditions in mind, this series of about 30 portraits spotlights the irony of socially engineered death as eye candy. Though the individuals whose likenesses I represent have been deleted from the social fabric by violent normative forces, these images are no monuments to restorative nostalgia: rather, they work as objects eliciting reflective nostalgia asking viewers to dwell on our social loss and longing, to use the comparative literature scholar Svetlana Boym's terms. These paintings offer viewers visual and linguistic paradoxes to think through the past. I have come to think of language itself as a medium. Pointing to the ever-flowing paint beneath my brush with drips and other incidental marks affords me the occasion to suggest that our deeply held human desire for closure is a teleological illusion. The work is always done. The work is never done. Why raise the dead? Why raise questions? What is the good (after)life? How do we mourn better?

Drawing:Ink on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:15 W x 20 H x 0.1 D in

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