HOBO at Gallery Paule Anglim, 2003

Begun after an encounter with a homeless alcoholic man living in front the NYC 10009 Post Office on 14th Street between 1st Avenue and A in 1986, Hobo is a "Reverie". The man had a red round head and I gave him some money the first two or three times our paths crossed. Thereafter, as funds dwindled and friends sickened and died I felt wonder and levied judgement upon him because of his persistence and survival.

After witnessing the deaths of two friends, one, Jeffrey Whitfield in 1986, who became homeless and was living in Tompkins Square Park until we got him registered at my address and then into a hospital; the other, Keith Davis, from KS in the summer of 1987, my work took a dramatic change.

Homelessness and AIDS were differing facets of the outcast in New York at the time. This became rich ground to work, to till. Time (life-span: the too-short lives of friends) and territory (he held his turf in front of the Post Office while sick friends were being evicted from their apartments out of fear) were real issues for all of us. This was happening to us.  I began to think of the AIDS Crisis in relation to events in the past where disease had played prominent roles.  Struggling to comprehend this invisible monster that was taking all of my friends away in such grotesque fashion, I began searching for roots of this disaster in history and myth.

In 1988 an old chest carved with the initials, "F" and "Y" with insignia of arrows and a yoke was acquired with money left by Keith.  It was while investigating this piece of medieval furniture that the work, Hobo, came into sharper focus.  A study of the Conquest led to an obscure reference to an Aztec god named, Hobo, who was celebrated with feasts of human flesh.  I could never find that reference afterward - perhaps I imagined it, but this reference, real or imagined, began the tale of Hobo.

The installation of Hobo at Gallery Paule Anglim in 2003 comprised a book (a ‘reverie’ composed initially as an incantatory film script), four paintings, one of Christ, one of Cortez, and two of the initials, "F" & "Y", on postcards of Diego Rivera murals, five objects/sculptures and four large digital enlargements of tiny sketches of events that I felt were common to all disasters, mythic or actual.  There were portents: The Desertion of Anhuac; the invisible adversaries; The Arrival of the Plague into Tenochtitlan; and acts of terrorism and demoralization; The Burning of Montezuma’s Aviary and The Destruction of the Great Emerald.  The digital prints were worked back into with hobo-sign and the sigils of Beelzebub and other infernal energies.  Because negative energies were invoked to do a portion of the telling of the tale, also incorporated were sculptures called, Containment, Rectification & Amplification Chambers to maintain a balance in the space.

By 2003, having been witness to many more passings, I felt I wanted to work less in a specifically personal mode and in a more poetic way using the mask of Hobo and the invisible energies of Fallen Angels to tell a story of cataclysm.