Artist’s Statement
The war chests are decorated with an array of medals, bars and stripes, epaulettes, braids, sashes, and tattoos. They are often headless, intoxicated with their own power, dangerous, blind, and in a world full of violence toward one another and the planet, with men, historically, at the center of the problem. In these enraging times, the work reflects anger, frustration, a sense of the absurd, and analysis of what masculine power, white privilege, and tradition have wrought. I talk about what is scary and threatening to me/us with a touch of irony, humor, pattern, exuberant color, and eccentricity.
This series follows Men in Suits (2016) and Men in Trouble (2018) which followed World Banksters (2013). Men in suits materialized in my work soon after the financial crisis. The subject continues to interest me because men in suits, at the nexus of corporate, financial, and military power, help to explain what we are doing as a country. They reveal our shared sense of entitlement and belief in the American Dream and the national myth of U.S. exceptionalism. They represent our intoxication by those values that put profit ahead of morality. We grant them immunity from prosecution and let them lie, steal our jobs and savings and homes, destroy the planet, deport immigrants, build walls, harass women, brutalize people of color, deny science, erode public trust, and make endless war.
