36″ x 48″-Oil on Canvas
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”Benjamin Franklin
Arriving just weeks after the tail end of my Purgatorium show, and using another Tempest quote for the title, it would be easy to think that this piece, was an outtake of that particular series. Except to say, with its psychic locale changed from the Liverpool jiggers of my childhood (Scouse vernacular for alleyways) to the primal shores of the US, it’s concerns became much broader.
What’s it about then? Like a lot of my work, I think it deals with the ambiguous notion of place in society, of being a stranger in a strange land, or rather the idea that we are all immigrants in someone else’s territory-be it dogmatically rather than geographically. The territory here of course being the mythical land of America-the Infant Aztec Sun God, Hiutzilopochtli-dangled like Achilles over a river of fire by his adoptive Mother, Libertas, the Goddess of Freedom, who you will see is menstruating oil and wears a blazing crown of Scud Missiles.
It’s the moral abyss that comes at the cost of national idealism, and its currently on show at my studio, and available for purchase.
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