The Kings Wander Beyond the Castle Walls
29″x22″; collage on Canadian geological survey map on mountboard; 2025. 2025-01-09A

“Wandering Kings” is a collection of collage works that shows figures walking through geographic survey maps; scenes from Susan Ross’s 1973 book, The Castles of Scotland; and other landscapes. In addition to the kinds wandering through the countryside, I show their crowns. This body of work sits in conversation with the previous series “Portraits on Arrival” and “Cocoons”, in which I portray men at the moment of expanded consciousness or gestating towards their own transformation. In a forthcoming series, I show men dancing on midden heaps of history and culture. Taken as a whole, these artworks are about the experience and process of liberation.

 

“In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform…No one liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others.”

(Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 1)

I see art as a tool for liberation, which I define as stepping outside of systems of power, something synonymous with society as we know it, humanity. Christian liberation theology and other social movements posit liberation to be a joyful thing. I’m not entirely convinced it is. In “The Problem of Freedom in the Works of Michel Foucault”, Inna Viriasova reflects on the French philosopher’s discussion of freedom and liberation and in doing so, highlights a complicated irony of queerness. “Foucault rethinks it [freedom and liberation], and presents an alternative view. He says goodbye to the modern/romantic notion of freedom as liberation from power through truth about our authentic selves. Foucault tries to dismantle this position; he shows that this idea of liberation is a product of a certain regime of power. For example, the romantic notion of sexual nature, which needs to be liberated, is a product of knowledge, which aims to subjectify and control us. By overthrowing sexual prohibition we are not getting freedom because images of what it means to be a fulfilled sexual being still dominate us.” Liberation, in this line of thinking, is not freedom from prohibition, but rather living one’s life as authentic, actualized self. Not only are we unable to do that and remain part of human civilization–as Sello Hatang said, “Without freedom for all, no one is free,”–I propose that not only do we struggle to imagine what a liberated self may be, the idea of a liberated humanity is beyond our imagination’s capacity. What are we to do?

“Wandering Kings” invites the viewer to consider the implication of moving outside proverbial castle walls, outside of society and the systems of power that shape our day-to-day existence. Self-appointed sovereigns move across the countryside; each step is a discovery of what it means to be free. As anyone who has gone for a long walk in the woods will find, you are left cold, wet, tired, hungry, and, worst of all, alone. So I imagine these wandering kings finding one another and building a new kind of humanity together. For me, this is queer community at its best and most nurturing.