I CANT CHANGE MY NAME (FALL 2022-SPRING 2023)
I Can’t Change My Name is a series of woodcuts created during my one year stint as the Artist in Residence at The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, between August 2022 and May 2023. Six woodcuts were designed, carved, and editioned on campus at the University, and exhibited for the month of March in the University’s Lawton Gallery, alongside an installation of studio drawings and the printing press (Ol’ Ras) used to print the blocks. At the bottom of this page is an excerpt from the poetic statement I included with the exhibiting pieces.
The work was based on photographs gathered during my time living with my parents in rural North-Florida, and writings I’ve made thinking on my relationship with my father, my brothers, and the paternal-familial heritage of the rural south.
The show’s name, I Can’t Change My Name, is referential to an running gag from my time in my undergraduate degree, in which I would insist that after completing college I would move to the Midwest and change my name; half of that came true with my time in Wisconsin, however a deeper and more complex appreciation for my family and the idea of heritage prevented the second half.
My family name isn’t real, and it’s made up of the stories of pieces of wood.
Growing up, my grandad’s family was at best ancestral heritage, at worst just a line of people with the same last name as me. Lumber workers from the Virginia woods who made their way down into the swampy forests of North Central Florida.
Growing up, my last name was at best the legal connection I had to a group of people who maybe looked like me, at worst a reminder of the junky old juke box sitting in my dad’s barn, the local radio station’s advertisements keeping the chickens and goats company overnight.
Growing up, woodcuts became a way to draw, to enjoy the process of things. To fall in love with moments, with memories, with myself. Woodcuts tie me to the bed of my great-grandad’s pickup, a freshly downed tree on the way to the saw; or a straight and strong board waiting to be put to work building the frame of a family home; shelter from the late-spring rains and the early-fall heatwaves.
Growing up, I was a cowboy, I was an artist, I was a brother and a son. I witnessed a million imagined lives pass me by, and witnessed all too real deaths. I witnessed my brother leave before the sun and come home with a handful of lifeless feathers, I witnessed the new life come out of the dead back behind the barn. I witnessed the oil drip out from under my dad’s pickup and out of the hanging meat that was once a deer, running through the woods near our house.
My family name isn’t real, but it’s everything I’ve lived, and everything to me. At its best it’s a reminder of where I’m from, a guide for where I’m going; at its worst it’s still a part of me. And I can’t change it. And I wouldn't want to.