Give Blood & Comfort (2002-03)

medium: acrylic on sandblasted granite
dimensions: 53" x 53" x 1" overall; 6.5" x 6'5" x 1" each individual panel

A reminder of death that waits behind it all; cartoons in graven stone, the exact opposite of decaying newsprint … in this new body of work, I have attempted to infuse granite (the material used by the funerary / death industry to quietly and respectfully monumentalize/cap over a ceased life) with darkly cartoon 'pop' impressions of skulls, grinning fear figures culled from the image bank of the culture at large (collected using the image-search function on the Google search engine and then transforming these finds into line-art); the skulls act as a kind of 21st century version of the "memento mori" reminding the viewer to "remember death", the inevitability that waits beyond life, love & entertainment; there is an unease to these works that goes beyond their surface and probes at the very uncomfortable protective bubble that the living place around themselves, particular in the Western world.