Anthropology

Date2022

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions36 x 36 in. (91.4 x 91.4 cm)

ClassificationsPainting

Credit LineGift of Mark Wurm

Object number2025.012

DescriptionArtist Statement: Painting through the decades, my images have focused at close range on families and milestones; but also, they have looked on a farther view of social structures, institutions, and power (im)balances. So in the present, there is a relevant view of Anthropology, honing in on imposed cultural values, paradigms, and blindness. The collected skulls, removed from graves and dehumanized by a scrim of science and transformed by academic language, become animated, talking with each other unseen and unheard by the self-absorbed, the sabbatical adventurer in field garb sitting in the halls of academia. Gone is the vibrant palette, gone the shared social pursuit, gone the nostalgia. Instead there is the tight, boxed-in, monochromatic reduction of life. Here life is echoed in a death as object, find, acquisition, and collection.

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