About
I am not the same person I was before the Iraq war. That experience changed me, both mentally and physically. Before the war, I was teaching industrial arts at a local high school. As a hobby, I designed and built furniture. I thought it was important to be a functionalist. My world has been changed forever because of the PTSD and TBI I suffered as a result of the war. Now I am primarily a sculptor. I deal with the physical and practical and what I have experienced, and because of this I feel I must incorporate the political into my work. The U.S. was once considered the guardian of freedom. Now we are recognized for cruelty and fascism. These are not the ideals that I fought for. And so I have found myself on a hajj, or holy journey, to find the answer to a pressing question. How did we get here?
The same forces that lie at the origins of the war that injured me personally I now see operating globally and nationally in different ways. My personal experience of war and its aftermath and the current surge of nationalism and ICE kidnappings have the same political and economic roots. This ultimately started ten thousand years ago with the rise of agriculture, leading to the development of territory, private property, social classes, and ultimately the state. My art piece Cain, Where’s Abel? is meant to bring this to attention. The division between Cain and Abel was manufactured by the deity, or person in power. If you look at the two brothers as reflecting settled farmers versus mobile pastoralists, you can see the story as a metaphor for conflicts between classes and over territory. Likewise, the division of class society and nationalism is also manufactured by those in positions of power, often using religion as a tool to justify violence and domination. I refer to this relationship in my past artwork Trinity of Ignorance.
My latest work Pieces of a Man represents the self divided by the consequences of war. The glass represents the false self, which is brittle and vulnerable, easily shattered like glass, feeling at the verge of disintegration or dissociation, juxtaposed against the bronze self-portrait representing the trauma of war, an enduring, tough and permanent condition. The splits in myself parallel the splits in society (order givers vs. order takers, imperial powers vs. the developing world, haves vs. have-nots) that gave rise to the Iraq war and continue to manifest in the horrors that fill the news today.
“He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche