Lost Flags
The flags series was an attempt to leap toward what I had been trying to articulate about fine art since I began making it. I just didn’t know how to say it. I learned from Jasper Johns that the flag was a simple abstract arrangement that lost all association with its abstraction because of the symbolic endowment. There was something to that knowledge that I felt was indicative of the entire enterprise of fine art. That we are arranging shapes and colors and endowing them with meaning.
“Race Flag” latex house paint on raw canvas, (2014).
Race Flag was technically the last serious painting I made. The photo above is all the documentation I have of it. In my own very self-absorbed world, Race Flag was a private send-off to fine art as I had grown extremely frustrated with the painting department at SAIC and the fine art institution as a whole. Race Flag was endowed with my very light theorizing about the teleological nature of existence. That everything that exists exists because it could sustain intself in its environment. The checkered flag is the symbol of the final test in a race in which only one can be selected by its environment. It was a universal symbol of this worship of the inherent perfection of all things: proven perfect for their environment because they are alive.
Literature Flags
Middle three: “Blood Meridian", “Moby Dick”, and “Sea Flag”, latex on raw canvas, (2014).
Blood Meridian.
The Literature Flags were the first series of flags I did. A lot of my inspection of human nature was inspired by the books I was reading at the time, namely Blood Meridian and Moby Dick. These inspections into the nature of things—seeking a universal—cut to the heart of my fine art. I wanted to know what fine art was, what we were doing, what it meant objectively. These books inspired the pursuit, so they were the first ideas I attempted to symbolize through flags.
The Sea Flag was simply a flag that reminded me of the sea.
“Sea, Sun, & Space” latex on raw canvas, (2014).
Sea, Sun, and Space is a straightforward flag. I was looking at a lot of provisional painting and I enjoyed the sparsness, the attention to restraint, the anti-preciousness.
“Fornicator” latex on raw canvas, (2014).
Fornicator is a meeting of my general arrangements and flags to depict heterosexual penetration.