Howard M. Skrill

Using vigorous marking honed in years of plein-air drawings of figurative monuments, I explore in paintings, plein-air drawings, studio works on paper, installation and pictorial essays, the remarkable fate of effigies in our times. These works are a meditation on effigies’ impact on the erasure of public and private memory and identity including rebellion against these impositions. Additionally I explore the persistence of effigies despite such intervention. These recent works on paper, torn, cut and collaged for installation and brought into being principally at Mother's Milk Residency in Newton, Kansas were created for an installation in Red Hook. They use Robert Moses' effigy combined with others, Met busts, figurines from second hand stores and imagined ghosts to explore how the physical legacy of the past and the imaginaries thus conjured twist the present out of joint.

My work fundamentally illuminates how power is imposed by the raising of effigies in public places and how shifts in power endangers these often-colossal piles of stone or metal sculpted into figures. The marginalized are often represented exalting in heroic radiances of their erstwhile oppressors. Starting a decade and a half ago I began dragging a Whole Foods cart near my long term Brooklyn home jammed with a folding chair, art supplies and Bristol paper to draw in plein-air, local effigies. Ruined surfaces encountered in person in all kinds of weather in parks and on the streets enabled spontaneous and often experimental mark making that still informs my practice. Words inspired by memory and research are combined with the images to become widely published travelogues through the landscape of fractured memory. An inversion has recently been demanded by many communities directed at effigies celebrating their marginalization. My words and images explore the imposition of power over public spaces in plein-air drawings, studio works on paper (displayed in frames and free floating on rigid supports), framed canvases, installations, pictorial essays and presentations. For years I have been cataloging the pulling down of effigies that have outlived their sale by date. Recently, through installation, extant images from my catalog are being ripped, punctured and screwed to a variety of physical supports to become tableaus of inversion of my own creation. Statues have been beheaded by crowds; I draw them or have drawn them. I create installations with a portrait bust of the marginalized floating in the proximity of the ruins that remain. In other images, mostly framed canvases, other monuments declaring dominance are blended with or have lurking in their midst, their sculpted antagonists. Additional studio works on paper depict effigies melted in furnaces, wrapped in plastic, cut in half, bound and strangled by straps, carried aloft by cranes and planted into graveyards of decaying cast offs. Factional contests over control of the effigies in public places as megaphones of identity is a central battle of our moment in history. The stakes being existential, I have, despite my project's humble origins, been forced to participate.