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Archeology of the Top 10%

State #1

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Top 10%: Hickory, gold plate, copper, brass. 24' x 16' x 12"
                                       State 1

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While completing the final touches to "La Liga" and laboring over the slow process of restoring the truck hood down in the shop, I kept eyeing remains of an old orchard ladder gathering dust in the shop. I had a strong personal history with it, as well as it being a "thing" that was saved years ago. Originally the ladder was one of two orchard ladders purchased in order to build the studio in 1989. It was valuable because it has a third leg allowing it to stand alone which is essential when building a house with 12 foot studio walls on the ground floor. After the studio/house was built, the two ladders shared duties. One was for use in the studio and the other went out side to serve a broad range of needs. Over time the outside ladder had been exposed to the elements and one of the legs had broken and was no longer safe. 
We do a great deal of winter brush clean-up due to the trees and natural growth on the property. Piles of dead limbs etc. must be collected and burned in the spring. One spring the broken ladder was thrown onto the pile as a way to get rid of it. When returning to the pile the morning after the burn, just outside the perimeter of the hot ash, lay the top part of the ladder. All else had been consumed in the fire.  The question coming to mind was, should it be picked up and placed on top of the hot coals to complete its demise? As it stared back at me, there was a very powerful connection with it on two levels. One was  remembering how much it served my needs over the years. The other was the overwhelming visual power it had as a "thing". I rescued it from the ashes and stored it in the shop. 
The task of working on the truck hood was boring and hard to sustain. As a diversion the ladder was placed close by on the work bench and the thinking process on what to do with it began while laboring on the truck hood. For me, it takes time for a spark of an idea to immerge in the subconscious before a creative pathway appears. The form of the ladder was there but its function alluded me. I was evaluating the condition of the ladder when a discussion on public radio caught my attention. The discussion was between the commentator and an economist discussing how conservative economic policies have impacted the working class in comparison to impact on the wealthy class. Much of the conversation was in terms of statistics. One specific piece of economic data caused me to stop working and process what was discussed. The economist said that the top 10% of the world's population controlled 87% of its wealth. I was so astounded that I researched the statement and found that it had come from the annual "Global Wealth Report". Going back into the shop to resume work on the truck hood, I looked over at the ladder and my brain connected a function for the ladder as a referent of global wealth disparity. I was looking at the very top part of a 12' ladder that was screaming at me, "I am the top 10% of the ladder of success and I am all that matters in this world. Everything below me is of no concern and there is no access to the top step because everything below me has been allowed to be burned away.
It happened that fast. The components needed work to reflect wealth and opulence, eventually leading to a complete overhaul. The fir legs were reproduced in (all American) hickory wood, the mettle frame was cleaned up and sent out to be gold plated, and all of the fasteners were replaced with copper and brass. I wanted to overall look to drip with privilege and superiority. Once the legs were milled, I then created another burn pile and placed the legs in the fire to achieve the same results of the original. Taking the legs from the fire, I treated the charred parts of the wood to stabilize and protect them from flaking during handling. The mettle frame came back from gold plating and it exceeded expectation. After all was assembled and the work was mounted for evaluation, I realized that there needed to be a connection between wealth and lies. History has proven that the two concepts are often interdependent. The tobacco and petroleum industries come to mind. Therefore I took that ladder apart and burned the word lies on the underside of the top and final step so that it could be seen by those below but not seen from above. In mounting the work for exhibit, I felt that it should be placed 10 feet high on the wall so that it can only be seen from below. The desired effect was to allow the viewer to look up and the ladder and visualize that there was no access to the top of the ladder.
After living with the work in the studio for over a year, I kept putting off a question in mind asking "what about that  part that got burned away? Finally, the left over Hickory wood was fashioned into steps and leg parts. They were then placed into another burn pile. When collected the remaining pieces were treated for durability, and some of the ash was recovered. It took another six months over the winter to decide how these new burn pieces of hickory would fit. Slowly, a visualization began to appear in mind.

I recalled visiting Greek archeological museums when spending 3 months volunteering on the island of Lesvos. The presentation of various recovered artifacts kept creeping into my creative stream on the project and I began to visualize the ladder as an artifact recovered from its discarded obscurity. I visualized a museum artifact professionally restored to what the ladder may have looked like as a whole. As a result, progress on completing the lower part of the ladder project started taking shape. It began with the base of the ladder. I needed to be able to attach the lower burnt wood shards to a base so they could be suspended into their reconstructed position. 

It took about a month to resolve the base involving making studies of the surface treatment as well as appropriate dimensions to accommodate the needed shard presentations. Next came the shards that would have mounts attached to the wall that would hold shards in the proper position reconstructing parts of the ladder. Finally there were much smaller shard pieces that were assembled, museum style, to suggest what parts of the ladder might have looked like based on what had survived. When all of the elements of the ladder project were placed, the task of fine tuning each part so that they were aligned properly so that one could imagine a whole ladder and in conclusion realize that the missing segments were those found in the middle rungs of the ladder with a few remaining bottom parts still in tact.

This was where the metaphor gained its impact on the viewer. If the ladder was a simulacrum of the distribution of the worlds wealth, then the very top is overly preserved in its gilt, while the middle class is completely gone, with some elements of the "servant/slave" class still visible. The message being that the rich protects its own and could care less about the middle class other than it is used to produce their wealth and are therefore expendable because of there being ample replacement numbers. This leaves the very bottom of the ladder which is fairly well preserved. This is related to a historic connection between the top 10% and their servant/slave supports. In every major culture throughout time, the wealthy top 10% require the lowest class to serve them in their needs. They range from private secretaries, cooks, maids, gardeners, drivers, security, nanny's, and the list goes on and on. When artifacts get dug up from ancient civilizations, what objects are found are "things" that belong to both the rich of the house and their servants. 

This was the image/idea that formed the final work of this project. It began as a work designed to make the museum/gallery goer to look up at the very top part of a ladder as though they were looking at the "Ivory Tower" of success and question why did so few have so much. It ended asking the question, "where is the middle class, where did it go"? It is a valid observation seen in every museum in the world. We know more about the rich and the slaves than we do about the middle people of human history. 

While completing the final part of this work, it was clear that its initial title was no longer relevant enough to represent what the work was becoming. The new title: "Archeology of The Top 10%" defined in the dictionary as: noun:  The study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains. 
The work evolved into a comment on how the human world population has begun to suffer from the economic injustices of the wealthiest top 10%  who have the industrial ladder of inequality. The hording of wealth is rampant across all sociopolitical ideologies. At the top of the ladder, the rich require all of the wealth while the middle of the ladder has been driven down to poverty level and the poor of the world are starving to death. If they have wages, they must overwork themselves. If there are no wages, they starve to death. The presentation of the work symbolizes a discovered artifact that has been reconstructed from what little remains of its original form in an attempt to give the museum goer a feel for what the "ladder of success" looked like before its decay.

















                   









         

                 Archeology of the top 10%: Burnt wood, charcoal, gold plate,                                                                  copper & brass fittings, acrylic paint.  9'x 32"x 26"      2021
                                                                     $15,000 
                                         

                   







                                           
     

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 This series began as a philosophical thought process in the late 70's and as time passed the curiosity over its meaning kept evolving and developing. It wasn't until the 80's after earning a MFA at City University in NYC that I had time to read more and explore some of the important thinking that was going on around the English speaking community of thinkers. While keeping a working studio on the Bowery, My reading collided into an argument between two intellectual camps known and the French School and the Yale School. They were involved in a deep argument over what each felt was the rudimentary sign of intelligent humanity. The French School claimed that it had to be LOGOS/the word since without it humanity couldn't communicate and cooperated effectively to survive. The Yale school claimed that the essential sign of intelligent humanity was PHONOS/the sound because sound and listening precluded language. 
The supporting argument of the French School made these claims. 1. LOGOS had its initial beginning as a scratch. The scratch referred to  a mark made on a surface. Their argument stated that the "scratch", in its nascent form was created by creatures on the surface of their environments as a way of getting from one beneficial place to the next. As time went on, and more scratches/trails were created around the various lands, it became clear that one had to learn the scratch/trails as a form of survival. Knowing which scratch led to drinking water and which led to the saber tooth den was a process that had to be learned. As such, the beginnings of human coordination was used as a tool for community. On the other hand, the Yale School countered with an equally valid proposition. They claimed that PHONOS was the beginning of human community because survival on any type of terrain in the beginning depended on human's ability to listen to the sounds of the environment and be able to distinguish what each sound ment and how to respond. Thus, each kind of sound carried a message that needed to be correctly responded to. According to the Yale School, It was through the process learning the sounds of the land, humanity developed an vocabulary that evolved into speaking. Therefore PHONOS was the beginning of us all.
This argument had a huge impact on how I looked at existence and I put a great deal of thought into it as well as struggled with the notion over quite a few cold beers. The question I had was, how does that effect me and my creative process or does it have any relevance? As a romantic, I felt the need to connect with a cause or "raison d'être". I chose LOGOS. As crazy as it sounds, I connected with the word scratch. As an artist or any artist that has claimed to be so, can easily identify "the scratch" as an essential and almost primal act of making art. To lay charcoal to paper and feel it interacting with the tooth of the paper with the intent of visually saying something to others feels like early humanity creating scratches in the earth that say, "This way to the swim hole and that way to the berry bushes. Just like my scratches on canvas intend to tell a story, those trails also told stories to those who took the time to read them. 
In this series I am interested in the idea that LOGOS transcends the written word because it is also a visual phenomena. Because a word, when printed, has both meaning and can be seen it has a dual purpose. This investigation is curious about adding a third possibility as a visual. I am asking my creative process to see if I can take simple words and create a visual plane that can be read as a word with specific meaning, use the word repetitively in such a way that its interactions cause intense design dynamics that render it for its visual appearance, and finally the words chosen, being void of sentence structure, actually tell a story for the viewer. 



  

MAGAZINE TITLE

Gnome Sequence:  series 2022

Portrait

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Acrylic on canvas 20" x 36"

AGAZINE TITLE

This was a work that was tied to the Democracy Project and was a transition away from a focus on the social chaos of American social disorder. While working out ideas for the base of the installation "Archeology of the Top 10%" I became fascinated with the visual power the word grid and its visual chaos. As the work on "Portrait" progressed, the word chaos worked its way into the composition and eventually overtook all other considerations that I had been thinking about. The work "MAGA Ghost Flag" began the "Democracy Project" series and it turned out that a flag ended the series. In the new sereies, the core creative element was how to focus on words, It became essential that the choice of words was crucial. The first three words chosen were: USA, Pledge (as in "I pledge allegiance"), and People (as in "We The People"). When the January 6th assault on the White House occurred and the investigation/testimony of Capitol Hill officers was broadcast, the words of officer Michael Fanone "Get his gun, and Kill him with his own gun" were blended into the composition. It expressed the intense contrast between a timeless ideal and the in the moment reality of American society. 

TRUTH #1

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Black impasto acrylic paint on upstretched cotton canvas, 56"x 26", 2023

Having transitioned away from the "Democracy Project", one word stuck with me and I decided to make an image using the word "Truth" in three different font sizes to create a visual texture with the interplay of the fonts competing for visual space. Once all of the lettering had been penciled onto the canvas, I began to understand where all of the visual chaos was coming from. There were two factors at play. First was the negative space behind all of the lettering and second factor were in the class of letters fighting for visual space. Because each font size was applied to the canvas in grid form there was uniformity to the font size. But when other fonts were applied in similar grid form a form of visual chaos appeared on the picture plane. The chaos appeared all over the canvas creating a kind of temporal confusion of the brain when looking at the work. That part of the brain that deals with visual interpretation was working overtime trying to make sense of the chaos. As cognitive beings, we aren't necessarily aware of that process as it is connected to the "fight or flight". Since there is no threat, the brain doesn't activate the limbic system. It might even be a pleasant experience for the brain to be in that state. I began to call these places in the image  where the letters fight for visual space "micro conflicts" and there were thousands of these places where the letters of one font partially obscured the letters of a different font  as the brain tries to order and "read" the words. 

   Evaldi

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Acrylic on canvas32" x 44" 2021-22

While completing "Truth", I was intrigued by the texture that was coming from all of the chaos and decided to make that more physical than visual. Relying upon works that were completed while working in my studio in Manhattan, I decided to use some of the texture techniques used then. As I was preparing the canvass, an incident happened in a small community in Texas called Evalde where a confused and angry young man senselessly entered an elementary school with a gun and killed 21 innocent children and adults. As the news played out over the next few days, it became clear that those individuals responsible for keeping the school grounds safe had massive failures in procedures which brought the citizens of Evalde Texas to go into the streets and protest. Their cry for justice to the politicians rushing to the scene to deliver their condolances, the news media fludding the community, the law enforcement officials, and the school administration was "Sorry Is Not Enough". Having to experience this kind of tragedy over and over in communities throughout the nation, I decided to tell this story using those words. I also decided to use only white paint as in White Wash of the pain.  

 Fence

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 Fence 30" x 37" 2022-23

While completing "Evalde", I began to think of other ways of looking at texture and text. The previous two works were in monochrome and I wanted to combine white and black paint to see how they would work. I also wanted to choose words that were broad and universal in their reading for meaning and settled on (you - me) (us - them) words as being open ended for meaning as well as relating to how difficult it is in today's world culture in managing pluralism in the masses. Additionally, I was curious about challenging a conventional technique of starting with the background and working forward. My question was, "what would happen if I started the with foreground and worked backward and approached this work with that process in mind. As I had worked all the way back to the field behind the words, I had reached the moment where a decision had to be made about what to do with it. The first thought was to paint it black and began to paint behind the letters starting at the top working my way through them to the bottom of the canvas. It was a slow and painstaking process that took a great deal of time. After about 3 days of filling in the background, I had completed just about the top half of the work with a slight diagonal running down to the right. I stopped painting and looked at the black diagonal for 3 or more days. Something was telling me to look at the canvas. Finally, I began to see two interesting possibilities in the work. One was that the black background began to look like the Silhouette of a mountain scape. The second was that the words began to appear as though it was a chain link fence. I went with that thought and began to make the changes that would bring out those possibilities. I accentuated the words and their diagonals to subtly suggest a fence and I made the mountain scape much more craggy. I was seeing  this work was an allegory for the possibility of a changing world order based upon multiethnic diversity being held back by their inability to understand and tolerate diversity from redefining the landscape 

More

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 More 47" x 59" 2023-24

As the background was being worked out on "Fence", a new canvas was being prepared. I was curious to see how would words and micro conflicts work at a larger scale? Would larger lettering actually have the same chaotic visual energy or would it have a different energy? Second was the continued interest in the idea that the purpose of words is having meaning and by extension, printed words as have visual authority to the reader and I wanted to expand on that. While going through the canvas prep process there was a horrific human crisis going on in the world. First was the invasion of Russia into the Ukraine and the second was the Israeli leadership laying siege on Palestine. It seemed that as each week pressed on, the atrocities in both confrontations became more and more tragic. After giving a great deal of thought to these events, it was decided to focus this canvas on these human crises.
To address the Russian situation I chose two words,  "Убийство", meaning to kill and the word, "Отбраковывать", meaning to cull. In my mind Putin's war goals were two fold. One was to take over Ukraine and make it Russian by using lethal force and the second was to empty his prisons, gather up Russian rabble, send them into the front lines and cull his population of deadbeats.
In choosing two works to represent what many around the world could identify as being an accurate appraisal of Israeli goals I chose the Yiddish words, "ויסמעקן", meaning to eradicate and the second word, "פאַרניכטן", meaning to exterminate. I also included the word "Kill". All of the words were individually arranged into grids with diagonal offsets and font sizes across the canvas. Then the offsets were treated with additional rhythm structures achieving additional visual chaos push pull in the picture plane. I was looking for a different visual chaos as the previous works done so far and to explore if different language structured words worked as micro conflicts and their ability to be read for meaning.

3 Degrees 

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Acrylic paint and charcoal on upstretched cotton canvas, 74"x 60", 2024

3-Degrees ( rectangle detail)

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While applying the fine tuning to "More", there was a flurry of emotionally cruel discussions happening in the media that seemed to be focused on the fact that America was being "invaded" by immigrant murders and rapists. Surrounding this issue was a handful of other issues like government spending, inappropriate  public education, and individual lifestyles. I decided to use this aggressive dialogue as subject matter for the next investigation. I also wanted to explore the lettering font even larger to see how it worked. Another goal was to present the layering of words in a different way by adding another repetitive element. While sizing and mounting the canvas, and getting ready to apply the rabbit skin glue and gesso I was curious about the standard process one goes through in order to prepare to apply an image which is to stretch the canvas, apply the glue, and then gesso the surface enough to get the kind of smoothness wanted the imaging process. I took a different route/process just to see if it would effect the final image. Therefore I began with the raw canvas and applied the pencil drawing of all the lettering first. Then the clear synthetic barrier was applied over the drawing. Then each individual area (background, lettering) gesso was applied which turned out to be a very laborious and slow process. 

    In applying the drawing, there were two technical goals. First was to take the  font grids and apply them in a 3 degree angle. The first grid to the left, and the second  grid 3 degrees to the right with the third grid being horizontal. The words chosen to be incorporated into the work were (Hate, Angry, Tolerance, Knowledge). In working out the design aspects, the story being told became the influence on how everything would be arranged. From years of teaching high school students with learning behavioral challenges, I had developed a philosophy that the humanity of any culture has to acknowledge that everyone has within them the capacity to be angry and be hateful. Through  generations, cultures pass on civility as being the social standard. The strength of a culture depends on how well everyone keeps hate and anger compartmentalized and controlled through having the ability to show tolerance over the those external forces that are not understood. The way  tolerance is sustained is through the passing on of core knowledge that prepares individuals to function with stern compassion for the good of the culture.
    As I arranged the words to be used supporting the notion suggesting something has gone terribly wrong with keeping hate and anger in check and it was making its way to the surface to alter the stability of the culture, I began to work out the positive/negative space dynamics. It was decided to put the word grid "hate" and "angry" into a 3:1 height/width rectangle to separate it from the other two words. Before working the canvas, I was thinking, "convention says that I start with a finished gessoed canvas, apply the drawing, and apply paint starting at the background and paint my way forward as an established process. Curiously I asked what would happen if I began  the front image and worked my way to the back image which I decided to do. First was to gesso the lettering on "Knowledge" in flat black gesso. Before that I took charcoal stick and traced over the words hate and angry inside the rectangles thinking they would be painted later. When I got to the  Tolerance grid there was a pause. While standing back to asses the how it was going visually, I began to like the idea that the raw canvas added an additional visual element to the work. I left the Tolerance grid bare and painted the background in black gesso. After completing that stage of the work, I began to see things in the canvass that stood out and needed to be resolved. First issue was that I have areas of blank canvass that hadn't been gessoed. There was the rectangle grid with the hate/angry grid inside it. I decided to paint the backgrounds of the rectangles in white gesso but thought it would be interesting to leave the charcoal lettering of the hate/angry grid alone.  By this time the idea of raw canvas being an integral element in the composition was a good decision. I felt it enhanced the overall visual and it would give viewers something to consider when looking up close at the work as part of the visual experience.
    With that stage completed, it was time to attend to how I could go beyond the micro conflicts and create texture to the work. It was decided to use the three states of paint (flat, satin, gloss) to see if manipulated, would create an kind of subtle texture that would be visually interesting. I also used layers of clear gloss acrylic in places to amplify the contrast. This took a great deal of effort and a number of layers were needed to reach a point that looked right. As this process was painstakingly being layered on, the presidential campaign was going full blast in the media and the dialogue coming from many sides was reaching extreme levels of vitriol and hate and accusation. I began to think that my original idea of compartmentalized antisocial behavior was beginning to break through civil rational idea exchange to the point that it was controlling the tone of social narrative pitting neighbor against neighbor. As a result I decided to take three of rectangles and pull them out of the background and physically extend them in space in front of the canvas as being symbolic of what was happening to the American story in real-time. The title for this artwork comes from a concept that was acquired as an education administrator. A presenter, at a training I attended, was introducing the idea how little changes can create massive change using the analogy that it only takes 1 degree Fahrenheit to convert hot water to the boiling point steam and how it relates to maintaining a positive learning environment. In this work, as each grid is tilted 3 degrees to the left and right, their actions tend to visually cancel each other and each grid looks horizontal. They balance each other out; but if something upsets that balance, like three small elements that are intended to challenge the balance, what will happen? That is the story of "3 Degrees".

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