These drawings represent my continued interest in the effects of altering well-known phrases or clichés by reversing the words on each side of the conjunction “and”.
I’m interested in the reversal’s potential for poetry and political commentary. I form their supporting banners considering spaces between phrases as silence. I hide letters and words, or obscure them in shadows, creating new words or an absence of words in the process. I place them all in front of an arc of radiating lines, an annunciation trope degraded, in these drawings, by its ironic function.
While selecting the phrases for these
drawings, I discovered they all had a particular resonance for me when thought
of in the context of the war in Iraq and what I consider to be the reckless,
arrogant, and isolationist policies of the Bush administration. “A.M.
in America” is a reference to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in
America,” and a pun on the word “mourning,” a state of being
I alternate in and out of, depending on how much I think about American, being
an American, and the prospects of raising my 2 ½ year old son in America.