Granfalloon 2026

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Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they're superior.

"History is merely a list of surprises," I said. "It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down."

I was impressed. I realized that nations could never acknowledge their own wars as tragedies, but that families not only could but had to.

"So many crimes committed by lonesome people in Government are concealed in this place," I said, "that the inscription might well read, 'Better a Family of Criminals than No Family at All.'"

I said that all the damaging excesses of Americans in the past were motivated by loneliness rather than a fondness for sin.

If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

And how did we

then face the odds,

of man's rude slapstick,

yes, and God's?

Quite at home and unafraid,

Thank-you,

in a game

our dreams remade

–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. quotes from Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!

In conversation with each other, these works – though completed years apart – touch on a feeling of disconnection in spite of supposed increases to connectivity. No my way (2016-2018), which I somewhat ironically consider to be my first 'serious' painting (as un-seriously as possible), represents a commitment to my own messy pursuit of learning and artmaking – an explorer walking into the dark, leaving home, asking questions. spill (2025) might be read as a second step in that narrative, throwing thoughts and feelings at the ether while teetering along rather precariously. Alternatively, perhaps they should be read backwards, as spill asks "Where are u?" and No my way responds "[on] my way," taking a step beyond the sad clown to look for wonder and connection in the universe. Either way, the paintings share Vonnegut's ethos and sarcasm. They're existential, bordering nihilistic, and represent a search for meaning from my position as an "interchangeable part of the American machine," much like Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain or Vonnegut himself.

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