In Philip K Dick’s Exegesis, he witnesses, in a flash of light, a moment of temporal overlay- The Black Iron Prison of Rome laid upon the present. Co-extant; never having fallen; a monument to the inescapable power of institutions, of technologies of domination, over mankind’s soul. It is a moment of stunning revelation for him, which shifted and shattered his world. But that, surely, was not real. Philip K Dick was mad, claiming his visions were brought to him by a pink beam of light from the stars. No such prison exists - Rome can no longer harm the apostles. 

In this newest body of work, I want to take this heavily freighted classical imagery, the regalia and visual inheritance of Imperial Rome, and use it to talk about us; where we are; and where we’re going. The general motif is a kind of Theogony, relating of the archetypal Titanomachy but deliberately misremembered. If Hesiod’s tales are an account of how things came to be, then I mean my paintings to be a story of how those old shapes may yet repeat themselves. With massive and ungainly composite figures, I mean to explore the hubris of American masculinity, ridicule the arch-myths of masculine conquest, and pick at the stupid knot at the heart of empire.

At the heart of it for me, I think these are about myths and ideas that mean one thing at a time and come to mean their opposite. It’s dialectical; every idea implies its inverse. That’s a fascinating property to explore in the stories a nation tells itself. All the more so in the tales, it refuses to tell at all.  

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Exhibitions