In every age, every artist has to find their own artistic voice, something often clearer in retrospect than in the present. I’m an artist preoccupied with society’s inhumanities, and I have, over the past five years, felt compelled to address the American inhumanities in front of me. I also have felt too close to contextualize them well — I wanted time for retrospection, but I knew I was caught.
Art and politics are strange bedfellows. The first is in the realm of the spiritual, the magical and unconscious. We want art to move us, help us transcend the quotidian, find peace in a troubled world. We love beauty. Politics is in the realm of governing, and is about power. At its best, its goals are humane and generous. But art and politics do not cross.
Because I’m driven to create work about political or social issues, I must know why I’m doing so, transcend my personal agenda and own my currently more privileged point of view. For me, I cannot confuse political work with art work; I don’t have the skill or temperament, and need to do them separately.
I spent my time at MARS in 2021 seeing if I could start to reflect on our particular American tragedies and injustices, and begin to figure out how to address and pose them as universal questions of the human condition. I left with a way to start grieving for the America I had thought we had.
