To Arms! To Arms!
2017
Ceramics, Wood, Mixed Media
10 x 11 x 8 inches
Veterans arrived back home from the war with Mexico, "broken down, out of health and dispirited- many minus an arm or leg destined to be cripples all their life."
Poilu
2017
Ceramics
14 x 16 x 5.5 inches
Status Quo Ante Bellum
2019
Wood, Ceramics, Mixed Media
37 x 27 x 48 inches
My narrative ceramic miniatures take as their subject neglected stories, the “footnotes of history.” The current piece which tries to raise questions rather than offer answers, housed in a "Gone With the Wind" French Colonial Dollhouse, complete with Greek columns, was begun after the events in Charlottesville and attempts to confront the viewer with the ubiquity of racial strife in America. The unglazed figures, the color of bone, are pieces of history and yet very much alive. The dollhouse rooms contain a group of linked stories referencing the Civil War and its ongoing sequelae-- division, loss and sorrow. The center two rooms show the costs of war -- a mother protects her baby, a father admonishes the heavens for his loss. In the entry hall, commercial products, purveyors of subliminal racism (Aunt Jemima's Pancakes, Uncle Bens, Negrita rum, the 2008 German chicken favorite “Obama Fingers”) cascade down the stairs reminding us that insidious ideas can become “normal.” The rhinoceros, in a nod to Ionesco’s play reminds of both of the dangers of encroaching fascism and paradoxically acts as a potential disruptor providing hope for the future. The 6 side rooms contain historical scenes from the Civil War invaded by current day images. Sherman, dreaming of burning Atlanta, visits his psychiatrist who offers the latest in psychopharmacology. Sheridan (who felt the only good Indian was a dead one), contemplates the Cleveland Indians mascot, Chief Wahoo, Booth rehearses his fateful act, a Mephistophelian character reading him his lines, Custer plays cowboys and Indians before Little Bighorn. Judah Benjamin, the first Jewish senator and the only Jew to be featured on currency in America (albeit Confederate) is pursued by his rabbi who warns him of his place in Jewish history; pictures of the Charlottesville riot with the cry “Jews will not replace us” are on the wall. Atop the house a lawn jockey looks out, whitewashed as many owners did to “erase” the taint of racism, reminding us that our history of racial violence cannot easily be eradicated, even if statues are removed or repainted.
American Infidelities
2018
Ceramic, wood, mixed media
9 x 14.5 x 11 inches
Grover Cleveland, both the 22nd and 24th president, “Big Steve” or to his detractors the "Buffalo Hangman” for personally hanging two men while serving as Sheriff of Erie County. While Sheriff he seduced the widower Maria Crofts Halpin who then fell pregnant with his child. Denying paternity, he had the woman was placed in a mental asylum and the child in an orphanage while Cleveland went onto to become governor of New York, and then President, all on the slogan “Always Tell the Truth” It would later be shown he had a proclivity to these sorts of things when he eventually married near god-daughter 27 years his junior, (whom he had once bought a baby carriage), when she turned 21 in the only White House wedding ceremony by a sitting president. His last words mark the end of a life of conviction, “I have tried so hard to do right”
Things to Come: Flannan Isle Lighthouse, 1900
2019
Wood, Ceramics
20 x 20 x 43 inches
The Flannan Isle Lighthouse Disappearance, one fateful December day in 1900 three lightkeepers vanish into thin air. There is a theory that one of the three men either in a fit of madness or rage went berserk, killing the other two and throwing their bodies into the sea, then following them and throwing himself into the water in a fit of desperate remorse and madness.
Border Crossing
2017
Ceramics
16.5 x 22 x 5 inches
Snowblind
2017
Ceramics, polystyrene foam, wood, rope
Sir John Franklin’s Expedition left England with 129 men to traverse the North-West passage, vanishing off the coast of Greenland in the year 1845. After 3 years trapped in the Arctic, the men were forced to initiate what could most appropriately be called a death march. They carried with them all the accouterments of English civilization – fine china and cut glass, Victorian silver, bibles and button polish. The prevailing attitude was “They perished gloriously.” All that remained of the best equipped expedition ever sent in search of the Northwest Passage were stark skeletons found in the snow years later, their attempt to conquer the arctic a sad testament to the hubris of mankind.
Female Equality: The Last Moments of Martha Place, 1899
2016
Ceramics, wood, leather, metal
13 x 11 x 8 inches
Martha Place, the Stuyvesant Heights-based "giantess" would earn the dubious distinction of being the first female sentenced to die in the electric chair. Marthahad, to utilize a phrase from the lexicon of the day, gone slightly, “off her trolley”, burning her stepdaughter Ida’s eyes with acid before forcing the girl to drink the poison and, when that failed, hacking her to death with an axe. Vilified by the newspapers as "homely, old, ill-tempered, not loved by her husband," there was little sympathy for Martha's plea of insanity. "It was a murder so shocking," said one journalist, "that nothing worse could be thought of -- that is to say, only one thing worse could be thought of, and that was the electric killing of the old woman." Teddy Roosevelt, governor at the time, refusing to be swayed by what he called "mawkish sentimentality," denied a stay of execution. After the first jolt, the Hancock Street Murderess was gone. It was, per the prison doctor at Sing Sing, "the best execution that has ever occurred here."
Homecoming
2018
Ceramic, wood, mixed media
8 x 14 x 9 inches
One of those returning home 100 years ago from the Great War is Frederick Trice having lost both legs to a German Whizbang at Villers-Bretonneux in 1918.
The Old Soldiers’ Home
2018
Ceramic, wood, mixed media
9 x 16 x 9.5 inches
“All the men but one were dead; the lone survivor ‘stood upright looking down at his hands, from which the fingers had been shot away’ Before the war, he had been a concert pianist.”