Episode 1: Vaughn asks, "What about Lee Bontecou?"

"If a critic were to look back at your work of this decade, thirty or forty years from now, what current events might they see as influencing your aesthetic and the themes in your work? How can you expand your own art ideas by thinking about yourself as an artist intimately connected to your own era?"

How do you address issues of your day into your art, perhaps in a subtle, non-literal way? Or, if you think your art ideas belong in another era than the current one, explain how they don't belong, or how you reject the prevailing sensibilities of our time.

Well... I don't think it would be possible to shake the assertion that the disparate elements that drive my work were driven at least in part by the world I experienced. The visual elements that fascinate me can certainly be applied to our military actions after 9-11, the shootings at Columbine High School (and the other myriad of tragic school shootings), video games - and the proliferation and commodification of people trying/needed to find a (virtual) escape.

Although initially I thought to reject these ideas, as my work was the physical object; it's presence and power and speed. I wanted to divorce the emotional reaction to things like guns and bombs and tanks. Instead try to view them as one would view elephants and rhinos on the savanna. I'm now coming around to the idea that it may be a foolhardy venture. How can I expect people to recognize and then appreciate these objects(machines) without considering their feelings and relationship to these things? It's not entirely fair.

I sometimes consider how my ideas might play out during the 1920's with futurism. There are definitely overlapping ideals, though eugenics and fascism aren't anything I'm interested in promoting. The same might be said for the Jet/Space Age of the 1950s/60s. Every kid wanted to be a test pilot/astronaut/explorer. Johnny Quest. Flash Gordon. There was still so much mystery to our world. And in that mystery there was freedom. Today we know too much. It's hard to let an imagination run with "What-if" possibilities when we already have so many answers in front of us. Although there is still so much we don't know about our world, and our universe, that "wild frontier" mentality has not prevailed. At least, not in my lifetime.