The Tempest
2014
Inkjet on watercolour paper
90 x 60 centimeters
During my high school art history classes I often wondered about the real meaning of some of the images in the textbook we were taught from. Our teacher had an unfortunate tendency to make art history dull while failing to intelligently discuss, for example, the Renaissance artist Giorgione's enigmatic 1506 painting The Tempest. In fairness, nobody has ever satisfactorily explained what the inexplicable iconography means but ultimately that is probably beside the point, it's the mad poetry which counts.
At first glance, setting my interpretation of The Tempest in a suburban environment may seem to be a lazy effort in parsing its possiblities. It was not intended as casual cleverness, my high school years were spent in suburbia so there is some connection between those mind numbing school classes and the dull street my family lived in. The suburbs have long offered the promise of safety and predictability hence the vigilante in his camouflage t-shirt could be viewed as a metaphoric protector or more darkly, a harbinger of an uncertain future.