The paintings here were featured in an exhibition “the age of Republics had not yet arrived”; they grow from the portrayal of our nations’s early times. Reliefs of colonial history from the Capitol Rotunda and Albert Bierstadt’s landscapes of the Yosemite Valley, are a few of the visual starting points of these pieces.  Visceral, powerful figures then pull the viewer into the pentimenti and threads of half-erased outlines and thought-lines that blur history, truth and myth. The images are populated with sport and superheroes, spectral Imperial generals and cultural visionaries. The material also becomes a central feature; a record of the artist’s hand (and person) through a trail of paint. Much in these artworks comes to exist as legend (or outright lie?), with glory wrapped in Stars and Stripes. 

 

As the artist says, “The works should be powerful but not congratulatory in the traumatic violence of our past. There are parts in these paintings I think about all the time in relation to our country —white supremacy, pervasive violence and broken promises; rebellion, poetry and triumph. I did not want to depict the height of violence as to glorify it, but to acknowledge and allude to it like blood in the soil. As a white Jewish man, I strive to balanced the privilege and otherness of my perspective in this brutal period of our nation. In the end, I aim at a sincere, emotional piece of art.”