Philoctetes’ Bow
oil and sand on canvas
30"x70", 2022
In Philoctetes’ Bow, I inscribe the description of 30 deaths of Chinese laborers during the 1871 Rock Springs Massacre onto canvas, obscuring it with an abstracted composition which could be described with bruised purples, collisions of paint, and a materiality emphasized by adhering sand into the crevices of the surface (which was accomplished through an ocean tide and fixative). Aspects of the composition also reference Frank Bowling’s Ratcliffe Cross II and Philoctetes’ Bow, the latter of which references the bow given to the Greek mythological figure Philoctetes by Heracles upon the event of him lighting his father’s funeral pyre when all others refused. Borrowed from Bowling are the materiality present in his two paintings which embody an abjection (which, for Bowling, came out of a series of murders which took place at Ratcliffe Cross in London), and the figure of the ‘bow’ which both emerges from and floats on top of the compositional plane.