"I felt the ground shaking beneath my feet, and the shaking was visible in my work." George Grosz

I am excited to follow an idea for a main project that will take the rest of the semester to accomplish, even then working overtime due to getting a late start. But upon talking about it with Davide, he supported this idea and believes it has a lot of potential to pursue it. 

Much of what I started to work on when I finally got some sort of studio put together was not working.  I had to figure stuff out. 

These are pieces that will work into the overall plan, which is scribbled out in my sketchbook and pictured below.

Some elements of this

With something from here

Plan scribbled out here

  

During the Mentor meet some terrific things happened while discussing the project and Davide helped me see successes in previous work I had thought were disaster. Themes and elements of work from all semesters, to include experience as soldier and tattooer started to converge and connections were made.  There will be documentation of the progress, good or bad.

Caught a train to Berlin and met my Mentor...

Before learning I would be moving to Germany I was interested in artists who worked during the Weimar Republic, such as Jeanne Mammen:

Jeanne Mammen, Berlin Street Scene, 1927-29

How fortuitous the discovery I would be moving there.  Even more amazing I'd be able to travel to Berlin to meet with my current Mentor, Davide Zucco.

The move to Germany was exponentially more complicated than originally expected, for both logistic and personal reasons.  Why I didn't think moving my life and three kids to a foreign land was going to be anything but crazy, I have no idea...I thought I would be in the studio (of which I did not have) upon landing.

Now that things are settled, getting back to work in this amazing place has been the most important thing and extremely welcome, in addition to exploring places I've only previously read about.

At first getting back to work was difficult, setting up a life outside the US was beginning to give me rapidly new perspective on issues I realized I previously saw with more of a limited worldview.  Going back to work I realized I needed to expand. I feel incredibly fortunate especially for the opportunity to gain this new information, however my intended work has grown into something else, or perhaps transcended.

In the first meet with my Mentor we spoke of work transcending the work before it.  It doesn't completely abandon the work before, but takes what it needs and moves forward.  I completely understand this idea, and look forward to working more and what comes out of this semester.

Some words on the banana project...

 For the banana project (its temporary title), I glued 9mm bullet casings to 22 bananas so that they took a phallic form disguising they were bananas, they looked instead like curved metal porcupine-ish objects made of radiating bullets.  Each banana I placed into its own rectangular plastic sealed box, so that the banana stood upright. I then compiled the bananas together to form a wall.

Close up of two sealed boxes of bullet banana construction.  First day of construction (no decay)

Bullet bananas in residency space.  The organization of the boxes changed a few times.

The initial idea behind it was a comment on the statistic of 22 US veteran suicides a day. The following points explain how the imagery corresponds with the intent:

• First, the idea of gluing bullet casing on a banana, is ridiculous. The absurdity of the act alludes to the absurdity of the present situation regarding veterans returning from multiple deployments to a war that called upon them many times with promise of aftercare, only to find the VA failing them.  
• Using a basic form of food, such as the banana, worked to signify a form of nourishment, 'that which feeds you'.  
• The shape of the banana, most phallic of all fruit, represented the hyper-masculinity inherent in military culture.
• As an institution, the military deconstructs the civilian and re-builds them as soldier, in so giving them an armor, both literally and figuratively as pertaining to the effectiveness of military training and the ability of that soldier to act in extreme situations.
• Visually and symbolically the bullets on the bananas represent this armor.
• However, separated from the others and placed into the clear boxes, the bullets, or armor, begins to weigh them down. As now on display, decaying from the inside while we can only see the armor, holding its shape (as I made a standing structure out of the individual clear boxes, 22 of them, so that viewers can inspect them easily, as well the decay happens slowly over time).

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• In his TED talk Sebastian Junger speaks of the military as being a tribal like society in that they are taught to operate as a unit, camaraderie being the bind that keeps them going, especially in the worst experiences. After separation they return to American society which does not operate like a unit, but rather for the benefit of the individual. The veteran then feels total isolation from this, having experienced how lethal that existence can be. It is not the malfunction of the veteran, but modern society.  To over-valorize the veteran and hold them to a 'special' status then further ostracizes them from society as a whole. 

During the residency, more ideas came out of this and it generated lots of great thought and discussion, to include themes not as military specific. Such as impermanency, the passage of time, the grotesque, and the idea that the slowly changing landscapes inside each box were themselves a type of painting.  It was suggested I do time-lapse videos of them or photograph them.  While at the residency I experimented with quickly photographing them and the outcome was promising.  I would like to continue with this, although with actual photography equipment.

These three following pictures are three weeks into decay (notice the 'bleeding' of the banana juices and mold. As well the patina of the casing brass):

Of course moving overseas impeded my immediate experimentation with the bananas as I could not get them through customs for many obvious reasons. They are left and stored in Florida where they surely have melted and are decayed. Becoming something different then they once were, still in their separate boxes, now hidden away in a Florida basement.  I am quite excited to discover their state the next time I see them.