Astronauts and Indians ... Paintings, 2011

I thought I'd share some of my work from 2011. These works are mostly acrylic on paper. The first one was used for the cd cover for Hudson Bell's record, Yerba Buena that came out in 2016. I also showed these works in my solo show in Litomerice in 2012. Working with American symbols I was reflecting on my ststus as an immigrant in the Czech Republic. The astronaut/cosmonaut figure with his heavy space suit was a self-portrait in some ways, encumbered and isolated by my foreignness I live here in some ways as an alien being. The works are about social exclusion and death, but also about friendship and overcoming difference.

This is a text I wrote about my work in early 2012. I had a show at the Prague gallery Berlinskej model entitled Ape and Essence referring to both the Aldous Huxley book and the Shakespeare quote from the Tempest from which he got his title.

Ape and Essence
The belief in superiority based on differences in technologies between the modern West and so-called “primitive” tribal peoples is a cultural construct. Many people find a satisfaction in believing that they are somehow better than other groups, but xenophobia is ultimately built on hate and fear of difference. No matter what, we all inhabit the Earth together. If the great Enlightenment project has led to genocide and environmental/social collapse, then one has to question notions of progress and man’s feelings of superiority, especially over his fellow man. Technology is tied to righteous self-belief, and science creates fictions that reveal our desires and fears. We are living at a moment when these fictions are becoming exhausted, the world itself is tired These paintings play with American symbols, the Native American and the Astronaut as an alpha and omega of the American experience. American empire is built on the foundations of the genocide of the native peoples, and this colonialist oppression is a keystone in the development of our modern technological world. The trip to the Moon reveals the escapist fantasy at the heart of the American dream. Science fiction is replete with masculinist fantasies of dominating space. But we are still nothing more than apes with shiny devices, apes in rockets on imaginary journeys to distant stars. We arose from monkeys and walked upright to dominate our planet. Yet even the astronauts are endangered today. Notions of space travel become foolish in our era of resource depletion. The irony is that the monkeys themselves still understand the world better than we do. They are arboreal, they live in the trees, they sleep beneath the moon. What other sciences and fictions could they develop?