flesh & bones—2004
Collateral Damage (Detail)
Our society uses violent and sexually explicit messaging to sell products and political agendas. Advertisers, screenwriters, and politicians indiscriminately exploit war, terror, and sex for their own ends. All that is natural, beautiful, and intimate about the human body, sexuality, and the human condition is obscured by the hard-edged, hard-driving, ubiquitous beat of surface illusion and manipulation. It pervades our media masquerading as “news” or “entertainment” and distorts our thinking.
Yet, when artists, writers, and other dissenters express the truth of human emotion, sexuality, or the horror of war, it is too often labeled obscene by groups with a political or religious agenda.
This exhibition of painting and sculpture is my reaction against this barrage of images that manipulate our emotions and invite us to “buy-in” to whatever they’re selling: jeans, Viagra, off-road muscle trucks, or the politics of war and power. It asks, "What does it mean to be human?"
