This is the video that was part of my December 2012 exhibition at Zosima Gallery. Both the show and the video were titled
You Will Never See This Coming. Here is a link to the video on YouTube:
You Will Never See This Coming
Currently the video is part of a group show titled
Mind Into Matter at the Gallery of the Common Experience at Texas State University. The following text accompanies the video in the gallery:
In August of 2011, I found out that I had a tumor in my
right-fourth rib. Three long and uncertain months followed before the
diagnosis arrived: it was benign. I had dodged a bullet. (For those interested, it was a non-sessile osteochondroma). During this time,
much of my art was becoming increasingly inward in focus, which was
unusual since I prefer to address issues that exist outside of myself. I made
paintings that depicted what the tumor might look like.
Some of them were accurate reproductions of
tumors from medical texts; others were grotesque imaginations of the “corrosive
lesion” that I had been told was inside of me.
After the diagnosis came in, I found that my attention was returning to the outward, and I was much less interested in my own
medical and emotional state. However, I did
not want to abandon these expressive paintings. I needed to find
a way to bridge these two different modes of thought — the inward and the outward.
Looking over my research from that period of limbo, when I was considering the very real possibility
that I had cancer, I was struck by two phrases that kept showing up over and over again: the War on
Cancer and the War on Terror.
Cancer must be
attacked aggressively and with the full onslaught of everything that is
available. Terrorism is a cancer that must be cut out and destroyed.
I decided to
continue the series by creating a body of work that dealt with the problems that
arise when the two terms are used as analogues for each other. But 20 paintings into the series, they were obviously split between the War on
Cancer and the War on Terror, and the two halves were not coalescing.
Several months later, after I had surgery to remove the tumor (along with 3 inches of rib), I devised the solution of literally intermingling these two different wars in one video. I appropriated footage from various sources, including Wikileaks, the U.S. military and medical websites. I also included videos that I took in my hospital room while recovering from the surgery. The final video bridges the gap between the War on Terror paintings and the War on Cancer paintings, uniting them visually and metaphorically.
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