FLAMEOUT
mixed media
37 x 19 x 8 inches
2020

By leaving no stone unturned in the unending quest for ever-increasing financial return - as we have seen with health as a profit vehicle instead of a care platform, endless corporate subsidies and welfare, global wars for resources, mining the planet to destruction, bank bailouts at every downturn - the system has created the conditions for its own demise.

The seeds of destruction are matches, struck not by the oppressed but by the powers that be. The flames will burn all in a system that is pinned in place, unwilling and unable to change.

BURN BABY BURN is the title of a poem by Marvin X about the Watts Riots of 1965. The Watts Riots (also known as the Watts Rebellion, depending on which side you were on) was a bloody confrontation between the severely marginalized black population and a white-dominated LA Police Department that had actively recruited racists from the deep south. Over the course of a week some 40 square miles of LA became a combat zone. The rebellion spread to other areas of California as far away as San Diego and was eventually suppressed by the National Guard with over 30 killed.

The Watts Rebellion was the result of economic conditions imposed on a disenfranchised population. Today the disenfranchised population is not just racial minorities, it is the vast majority who scramble to provide for their most basic needs under the thumb of a system that financially brutalizes them for its own benefit.