My most recent exhibitions at Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn, New York and at Kendall Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, featured sculptural forms composed of cast plaster heads. Each head form is rounded where a neck would normally be, so it has the shape, size and weight of a large fruit.
The heads have been fabricated using the methods and materials involved in the making of the plaster statues I restore. I’m painting their eyes in the manner that saints have been painted for over a hundred years. I’m basing their palette on the skin tones of St. Augustine, St. Blaise, San Juan Diego and San Martin de Porres.
Without bodies, these heads become very contemporary forms, and address very contemporary questions, but they speak in strong, quiet terms to the past. This body of work was catalyzed by the presidential election campaign and what felt like a massive plea for a paradigm shift, which left me thinking about revolutions and the images associated with them.
The resulting works call to mind stacked ammunition, toppled statues, fallen soldiers, crated weaponry and cannonballs, but they do this without gore or violence. Indeed, any potential threat is ideological rather than physical. And with regards to its new direction, this recent work demonstrates a sort of (slightly hyperbolic) personal revolution.
The most recent of these new pieces have started to experiment with the form of the head itself.
These piece incorporated a broken bird removed from a statue of Our Lady of Fatima I restored. (The church wanted her doves to not be in flight, so I made new ones with folded wings.)
This piece was designed specifically to address this large column in the center of the gallery.
This head got (happily) broken in transit to the gallery and became a metaphor for optimism.
