Creating a Ferric Monoprint 

 

I have spent my career working in steel - large-scale, site-specific work that occupies space and demands attention. I know the material intimately. What it does, what it offers, how it transforms over time. This series began with the same steel, a new technique, and a simple discomfort: I can no longer read the flag.

I see the flag everywhere - on porches, on trucks, at memorials, at protests, claimed by every political party and group of Americans simultaneously, and I no longer know what it stands for. Not what it represents to me personally; I know that. I mean what it signals when I see it flying out there, across our country deployed by people with different intentions, different beliefs, different visions of what America is. The stars and stripes have become so loaded, so claimed and reclaimed by competing groups, that they no longer communicate a single thing. That ambiguity and uncertainty was what I needed to work with.

The flag was never painted to create these works. Its parts and pieces were held against a prepared surface and allowed to mark it through oxidation and chemistry, a process that cannot be fully controlled or exactly repeated. Each panel is a record of a specific moment of contact between material and surface. What remains is the trace of something familiar, stripped of color and declaration, reduced to geometry and rust.

We each arrive at an image carrying the whole of our life experience, including our histories, losses, loyalties, and complicated relationships to the symbols we inherit. What you find here is not only what I created, but also what you bring with you. This gap between readings is not a failure. It is the subject.

                                                                                                                                   -Peter Trout Gard