Economics of Suffering
Economics of Suffering is an interdisciplinary project that combines visual art, performance, installation and a community outreach component to explore devastating effects and emotional scarring caused by the ongoing worldwide financial crisis that peaked in the period of 2008 - 2010. The work explores psychological ruptures wreaked on those most vulnerable-the mentally disabled, the elderly; those in extreme poverty and other disenfranchised populations suffering from homelessness, hunger, and violence.
The avarice of multinational corporations’ cuts in government aid, and an unjust judicial system, have only served to exacerbate the levels of suffering of the poor and disabled.
Economics of Suffering mural at Andrew Edlin Gallery. This painted mural which is around 20’x16’ done with Pantene acrylics liquid, jan. 2019
This is a graph of the downturn of the stock market and how it affected labor. Even though this is a segment of history this incident resulted in a totally broken stock market and millions of unemployed and dying. This was the warning sign for today’s financial issues.
Emotional States of Zero – depicted is a character named John who started out as a homesteader and copper miner on Copper Mountain Mesa in the Mojave Desert. As he grew older he became more. It lived in extreme poverty. When he died his wild dogs ate him. This scene was developed about a true story which happened in my neighborhood in the early days of 2000.
Hammer Rhetoric
20” (h) x 13” (w), gouache with gold leaf, paper, Dibond, etched steel 2012.
In the fallout of twilight, Massacre finds his work in tools pounding his head. The pounding replaces working in the car factory where he made good money creating cars. His thoughts are disrupted. He has taken up meditation and is pregnant with a baby Buddha. His dreams have turned into his own personal nightmare. Massacre cannot think straight – he cannot rest or meditate – he is on fire from sleepless nights.
Only a Chasm Lift
20” (h) x 13” (w), gouache on paper on Dibond, 2017.
Isabella No growth sits in the hallway of a county hospital. She has been in the hallway for three days with no treatment or diagnosis. It is clear she is dying. She is on oxygen tubes, floating. Isabella has no money to pay for services as she is from a mining family. Instead of rehabilitating coal miners, the government is fighting hard so they can keep their jobs which are killing the workers, the land and the air. Isabella has pneumosistic pneumonia and will probably die in the public hospital whose funding was drastically reduced by the government. As a result a rich person can buy an antique race car for a couple million.
Hospital Wardens
20” (h) x 13” (w), gouache on paper on Dibond, 2017.
The experiments on the body happen in the back room and secret corridors of most public hospitals. The patients/inmates are being over medicated and are having unnecessary surgeries. They die long before their bodies give out. The wardens are numerous – sometimes there are two to a patient. They are culturally diverse: Monsters, African Americans, Asian, Indian and White. The wardens have parties on the wards while patients are hooked to respirators, electronic wires, and antibiotics. They perform surgery near the collarbone so that more tubing could be inserted into the body. All medications go through these tubes. The patients defecate on their bodies before the spirit flew away and gest caught in a black widow’s web.
Needles and Probes
20” (h) x 13” (w), gouache on paper on Dibond, 2018.
In the metallic space, we breathe as we work the factory of the death machines. When in the factory we take jobs that humiliate us and cause the body to convulse in pain. We rationale it as it is work and we are getting paid. The needles and probes in our bodies are filled with dynamite and convulsions. The needles cause blood, pain, and red splashes on our cheeks. The defecation machines are humiliating and medication causes us to hallucinate. Yet somehow in this reign of pain and distortion, we develop rose colored eyes. The world around us is pink and our red and white polka dot bodies diminish the excruciating feeling on the line of extinction, between air and suffocation.
Economic Paradigm of Life
13” (w) x 20” (h), gouache on paper on Dibond,2018.
From film to the trinity to the massacres of the holy wars, humanity carries innate violence as its weapon of survival. The trinity comes from a compilation of all aspects of life and from the thoughts of personas that are filled with a film noir reality. Working in the film industry, we pray for jobs without sexual harassment and for a part that isn’t porn. We look into the wounded fragment of blue collar workers who are altar boys, janitors, and house cleaners. In the paradigm of life we give up a limb or two to feed our children.
Genocide I: Rwanda
8’ (h) x4’(w), pencil on paper 2012.
This piece is a study for a trilogy of paintings on genocide. The three pieces combined explore the economic motivation towards genocide. The factors include race, land acquisition, oil, and other financially profitable businesses for the very wealthy – the people in power. In this investigation, I have depicted Yasuo Fukuda, Tony Blair, Paul Martin, Gerald Schroder, Silvio Berlusconi, George W. Bush, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, and Jose Barroso. They are depicted as half machine digging up the different genocides contained within a human breast. During the Rwanda genocide, many countries had a policy of non-admittance to other countries thus trapping those who wanted out and obliterating most of the population. The drawing depicts various brutal ways in which the Hutus and the Tutsis obliterated each other. The economically powerful in this scene are Yasuo Fukuda, Tony Blair, and Paul Martin.
Genocide II: Cambodia
8’ (h) x4’ (w), pencil on paper 2012.
To represent the Cambodian genocide I chose George W. Bush, Jose Barroso, Silvio Berlusconi, and Gerald Schroder. They are wealthy, ruthless adventurers who helped control the World Bank. If you think about it, economics has its hand in just about everything. The Genocide in Cambodia methodically murdered artists, scientists, intellectuals, innovators, women and children. The military exterminated a half of the population. If one goes to Cambodia, there are skulls of all sizes in the roads, by the lakes, and in the rivers. There are mass graves all over the country. Economics inspired people to deny their feelings, emotions, and empathy .They wanted more in the land of toxic brain waste.
Holy Dismemberment
8’ (h) x 4’ (w), gouache on paper, 2005.
Financial rape and the toxic dump of economics makes us full of despair. We endure pain such as a fractured back, broken or herniated discs. We get arthritis, our organs deteriorate and we are sad and desperate. As a result of foreclosure, eviction, and loss of income, our body deteriorates at a faster pace. The person in the painting has removed her bodily organs and has put them on altars, like a ritual to her. Her plan is to replace the organs in her body so she can start over and make a new beginning.
Poetic Pond of Despair
13” (h) x 20” (w), gouache on paper on Dibond, 2018.
Susan Diva was a waitress at a place called the “Disaster Lounge.” Men sexually harassed her while paying her minimum wage. The boss kept the tips. She has a daughter who lives to play “ducky” in the bath. They sleep on box springs. One day, Susan Diva climbed the “torture” mountain made of dead trees and slippery gold coins. When she got to the top, she lay across a point that tore her psyche apart. People jumping off the mountain are running from the World Bank and fall into the green abyss.
Listless Harpist
20” (h) x 13” (w), gouache on paper on Dibond, 2018.
In the melancholy of my dreams, I envision rehabilitative prisons and mental hospitals. With funds being taken from these facilities the inmates cannot be groomed into good citizens and thus cannot become productive members of society. In my band of I created in a different dimension I play sad musical machines, in the sounds of the oppressed – the homeless, the incarcerated, and those who live in alternative mental states.
Intestinal Tongues
13”(h) x 20” (w), gouache on paper on Dibond 2018.
In the warm glow of the ocean’s heavenly shine, we speak in tongues in an economic language we cannot grasp. The dark suns spread grapes over our bodies and we look at the organs within. Our lives collapse due to high interest rates, not being eligible for a loan, and the ticker tape of Wall St. sliding downhill. We are angry at ourselves and at our government for being dysfunctional. We balance our check books every week, keeping track of meager earnings while Trump wants billions of dollars to separate us from our Mexican friends. Immigrants have always been a part of the working class economy. We are not only losing our tongues and organs, we are losing the immigrants who help our factories stay financially solvent. We have lost our ability to walk in the light of the golden suns and encapsulate the positive light within.
Genocide III: American Indians
8’ (h) x 4’ (w), pencil on paper, 2012.
Again, in this genocide piece, we deal with history. When Europeans first came to this country, they found a peaceful culture of Indians, which were for the most part, transient and followed the buffalo as their food source, to make clothing and thus employment for some tribes. Then there were Indians who were farmers. All the tribes respected the earth and its inhabitants including the sand, mountains, rain, sun and snow. If they killed an animal they prayed for its spirit and prayed before eating. Their lives were lived in a simple way. Then the Europeans came in and started killing off the Indians, invading their land, and seeking power over them. At the top left is Vladimir Putin and to the right is Jacques Chirac both whom deal with money, power, and sovereignty over mass populations of the world; they were members of the G8. We see and hear the Indian story repeated in our modern life. Finances are representative of stealing, using the masses and taking power over them. Oppression is a big part of the human condition and has been throughout time.
Raising Currency
40 ½” (h) x 27” (w), pencil on paper, 2017.
Around the world, we print our money and this is what we use instead of gold, to trade/barter. This paper with its fancy drawings has caused wars and despair led by the people who have the most money. The victims are the members of the mass population. They fight the wars, live in violence, and then in utter poverty. Their houses catch on fire, the septic system stops working, and shit overflows from the houses of the 99%ers. Their dolls, animals, and homes are destroyed by the neglect of the landlord who is a living in an apartment in Trump Tower. He doesn’t hear the cries and screams of anguish. He just sits on his golden toilet and lives the American Dream.
Check Mate: Monkey Stew
4’x4’, gouache on water color paper, 2012
In the Great American Way the parents eat their own. Here you have a parent who is too poor to provide for her four children so she decides to copy the Qing Empire of China who had ceremonies where they ate monkey brains from the live monkey. This continues the circle of poverty and oppression of the children. The parent has turned into a green monster and plays chess while she devours her children’s brains.
Cash Air
20” (h) x 13” (w), gouache on watercolor paper on Dibond, 2018.
Petroleum products are now airborne. This person is on oxygen laced with petroleum. As fuel prices rise, the driver of the vehicle is dying because petroleum is in their lungs; it creates a heart condition where the heart is going to burst and kill the sick, sleeping driver. The driver’s dreams fall upon the pink pillow. She dreams of ancient animals that were on earth before humans. The human has created millions of modern animals who need petroleum products to work properly. The earth is dying and so are its inhabitants. They cry out. “Where are the electric cars and clean air?” The patient’s heart bursts and the animals come alive off her pillow and devour her flesh. Petroleum products are sold throughout the world at a huge profit. They will never give up their net gain.
Body Type C Minus
13” (h) x 20” (l), gouache on water color paper on Dibond, 2018.
Currency has a contagious viral disease and is overriding our bodies from within. Ghostly gingerbreads hover around us acting as wireless conductors to our inner turmoil. We float into the infected waters as the stock markets continue to fall 400 points a day. We think we are alive with cans behind us, but somehow that fatal disease of poverty is in the pockets of the water we drink.
Tube Dream
13” (h) x 20” (l), gouache on water color paper on Dibond, 2018.
Time is running in reverse throughout the dark universe. We are going back through time into the golden era of trade and barter. We exchange a painting for groceries instead of getting federal cash aid. It seems the economy of the wealthy is making us poor folks sick. We lay down for open heart surgery and find out our heart has been long gone. As mummies we try to open a bank account but can’t use our blood, as rigormortis has already set in. Our relatives can sell our corpse to the museum but selling bodies is popular so it’s hard to close the deal. Backwards is forward and the US economy is going toward bankruptcy with a trillion dollar debt.
Double Trigger
20” (h) x 13” (w), gouache on water color paper on Dibond, 2018.
We are being followed by periscopes that have their origins in water. As modern surveillance unveils objects such as the drone flying down Giant Rock Road in front of my home, we have less time in which to develop and focus our thought processes. The boats we are on require less unification of the body/mind energies. This “being watched” creates paranoia and makes us afraid in our life such as going on job interviews, employment fairs, and our right to make choices. As the water moves though the spiritual that has taken over our bodies we think how we can “cash in” on the gold from our bodies and how they are made. We calculate what we could do with the cash if we gave up our bodies forever. We would give up “touch,” spirituality, and sex for money.
Holy Mountain
8’ (w) by 4’ (h), charcoal on drawing paper, 2006.
As our transmutation from organic to machine occurs our search for a God-like figure is still comparative. In times of trauma, our desire is to know the unknown that unlocks our brains. We long for the Mountain of perception made of ruby eyeballs. In prayer and desperation, we long for comforts such as fresh food and a body that is attached to the body to the body. If we had bodies we could form the ruby eyeballs from the mountain, cash them in, and plant trees. It costs too much to correct the environment. Would you have us believe there is climate change? The rich have tax relief and can afford good respiration equipment while the masses cannot help themselves financially and thus die from the inhalation of dirty air.