Here's what I'm thinking about

I am feeling more hopeful about the future, but there are still lots of problems to solve and we need to stay awake and vigilant. I'm thinking of a new series of standing figures called Sentinels. This is the first one (above), Bondage. It's made out of wood; the white things on the chest, possibly a kind of armor, are the tips of pork ribs I got from a pot of posole my mother made me. The arms are mostly chicken bones, the skirt is a bunch of old hacksaw blades, the head is the bowl of a clay pipe. It's standing on very long legs made of steel rods, welded to a steel base (that you can't see). I guess we're not out of the woods yet.

To put this work in context, I've made lots of different kinds of standing figures over the years, like Oracles, three of which are seen at right as a part of an exhibit I had called Gene Pool at 215 College Gallery in Burlington, VT about a year ago -- October 12 - November 4, 2007. This was, I think, one of the best exhibits I've ever mounted, and one of the first that was (in terms of my intent) about a political/social issue -- in this case, race and gender. The wooden trencher in front of the figures is the Gene Pool, with lots of buttons representing people, MOST of which are brown and black. Only a few are white. Who would have imagined then that we'd have a president-elect who's African-American? Hurrah!

The other early Political exhibit was my first solo show at the Lazy Pear, March 15 - May 14, 2007, titled Curious Lifeforms, including These two pieces, Homage to Cindy Sheehan (left) and Mother Earth (right).