FLAYING FATHER, 2018 - ongoing
FLAYING FATHER, an ongoing cycle, reappraises the ‘founding’ figures and principles of our nation, specifically the five of our first seven presidents who owned slaves during their presidencies: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson. The faults of our typically revered ‘founders’ are often justified or excused as norms of their times. But other founding fathers like John Adams, abolitionists across races, and the enslaved themselves rejected slavery as a barbaric institution. The capitalist ownership of human beings was never acceptable except to those driven by greed, profit and power—and the acquiescent.
These five presidents enslaved hundreds of people, institutionalizing free labor that generated personal profit and fed our unfathomable national prosperity. The constitutional heritage that our founding fathers forged is indeed foundational to today’s injustices. The system that served their interests still promotes political disenfranchisement, racism, property rights over human rights, and hypocritical rhetoric espousing democratic values. Willingly or unwillingly, we are all invested in this legacy.
‘Flaying’ refers to the hubris of the mythological Marsyas, who competes with and offends Apollo by playing his flute and whipping everyone into a frenzy—an apt metaphor for the incitement of demagogues, then and now. Accounts of his penalty vary—between having his flayed skin nailed to a pine tree or converted into a wine sack. His cruel fate warns against the self-congratulatory myths and actual practices of our nation—and their ominous repercussions.
Figures are drawn in dire conditions, suffering dilemmas of their own making or overcoming circumstances of their servitude. They occupy tableaux of reaping and yielding, exacting and extracting, whether in domestic or work spaces, distant fields and hospitals, or factories and classrooms. Subjects meant to yield, and whose yields only enrich others, become reapers of retribution and restitution. Those who insure their own privilege, through exclusive legal rights, become, in turn, subject to unflinching scrutiny.
These works expose a false hagiography, through the viscera of avarice, organs of oppression, cavities of omission, tumors of hubris and sinews of hatred. Multiple operations are necessary to make us whole, with sutures of reparations for an authentic justice.
