Amirbar in Three Movements

or La Culebra Que Muerde Los Pies

A large-scale collaboration with Meredith Lones, created for display at a 2019 group exhibition with Meredith Lones, Sara Moseley, and Stacey Kiehl.

The inspirational seed for this work was seeing the exhibition “Blind Field”, in 2013 in Lansing, MI at the Broad Museum. This exhibition, a meditation on contemporary Brazil, included the piece “Modelo de superficie (Surface Model)” by Marcelo Cidade, a to-scale black and white photographic image of the surface of plywood, mounted on plywood and resting on two cinder blocks. The simple method to question representation and expose the contrived construction of something as mundane as a common construction material was the initial impetus for this work.

A collection of small 6”x6” ink drawings and collages comprise the ‘asphalt’ for a triptych of 4’x8’ large collaged ‘road’. The original images were manipulated through a combination of digital and xerox printing techniques. The resulting images were further disassembled, torn, and cut to be recomposed on a larger substrate.

A pretentious tart painted with local color as vulgar as it was false, her arms opened wide to tourists from Texas and the Midwest, a repugnant sample of the worst of the American middle class

A certain sliding of the parts of a firearm when it has just been oiled after a meticulous cleaning

It was as if the night had suddenly swallowed him up

The fruits continuously washed down by the river

The splash of his boots on the wet ground grew fainter until it disappeared

Vertigo, the death rattle, the final stillness

The collaged images were adhered to a layer of Tyvek mounted on 4’x8’ sheets of Foamular XPS insulation. This pink foam material is found everywhere in commercial, industrial, and residential construction. It is manufactured by the Owens Corning Corporation, which was founded and is headquartered in Toledo, OH, my place of birth. The headquarters of this massive corporation, not a household name, but one whose products live in virtually every home in the United States. These materials are shipped out on the Maumee River, onto Lake Erie, through the St. Lawrence Seaway, to the Atlantic, to be distributed around the world.

A road connects as well as flattens. It prioritizes one destination and pathway, while bissecting and disrupting others. A road is not just the tar, concrete, sand, stone, and rebar from which it is made, but is also composed of what travels on top, the history it buries, and the futures it extinguishes and creates. It is more than it’s composite parts, it is the gum, oil, blood, living matter, and detritus spilled and flattened on top of it. It is an overland river.