Arden Cone

These paintings are the beginning of a larger series that explores the January 6th riots that shook America in 2021. From the wings, we watched the rank conquering, plundering and assault that took place at the U.S. Capitol building that day. We watched, most of us in horror, as the pillars of democracy seemed ready to fall. Democracy, we said, is what this country was built on. How could it shake beneath us? Yet we don't have to dig deep to see the history we remember as a fallacy.

Out the window of the U.S. Capitol's East Front entrance, one sees the U.S. Supreme Court and the Library of Congress flanked in the periphery by two of the building's outer doors. They were sculpted in the mid 1800s by an American expatriate, Randolph Rogers. Each panel of the bronze doors depicts a different scene from the life of Christopher Columbus, the ultimate conqueror in American ideology. Though hailed through the centuries as a hero, the quintessential American archetype, his exploitation of the land and its indigenous peoples was anything but democratic.

These works seek to complicate our existing narrative of the nation's history, exposing that our country wasn't built upon democracy. Throughout our history, authoritarian rule can-- and does-- hide under the guise of patriotism. Democracy is fragile.

STATEMENT

My work interprets the socio-political culture of the American South, acknowledging the history that has shaped its dominant worldview for centuries. In the nearly discarded refuse around my family’s farm, which I incorporate into my sculptures, paintings, prints, and installations, I feel out parallels that are descriptive of the southern condition.

Busted boards, battered pipe gates, and worn down tractor tires, all vestiges of the land, have suffered blows and distress through time’s irreverent passage. So have the people of the South. The mileage takes its toll, both collectively and individually, the past informing outlooks on the present. Centuries of resistance to progress tell us that southerners don’t reckon well with the past, and so the running log of unresolved traumas—from the enslavement of Africans, to the carnage of the Civil War—plays out on in rhymes to present day injustices. The past, its unthinkable pain, lingers on, the hatchet yet unburied.

Through my art, I expose the ways in which collective grief has torn apart the region’s societal fabric. Those who have archived this past—generally, the privileged and, oftentimes, the perpetrators—have left a perilously imperfect tracing of time’s passage, leaving much of the story unaccounted for. In the present day, the fight to correct the narrative is at the center of the political conversation. Whatever agent is at the helm of history’s archive swings the tide of politics today. My work brings me to become that agent, and visual art my platform.

STATEMENT

My work explores the South’s identity and the enigmatic people—myself included— who have built its culture. Through the course of a painting or sculpture, I intend to pause the viewer, holding them in suspension between the conflicts, chaos, and beauty of the Southern condition.

My hope is that the viewer may simultaneously embrace the pain and the laughter of existence here, taking into account the confusion in our cultural rhetoric, past and present. This land—that of the red state paradox and the Confederate flag waving, selfproclaimed, quote-unquote, "American patriot"—is as incongruous as it is ironic. The people of the South are known to dazzle visitors with Southern hospitality, but, “make yourself at home,” and you’ll run into a constituent that is averse to racial equality.

The remainder of the nation routinely begs the South for humility, and though the proudest offer none, I look hard at the uncomfortable truths that have made even what I love of the region. Through my art, I approach questions of privilege, access, and nostalgia in the South, making use of humble materials from my family’s Carolina farm. Though these issues hearken back to the inequalities of our past, they are ever-present and increasingly important to flesh out.

STATEMENT

I make paintings that both reflect the decorative sensibilities of the mid-1800s and tell stories of Civil War memory. While I make these paintings from a Southern perspective, I intend for them to resonate with viewers of all types, reaching beyond a regional understanding. My most recent paintings, rendered on ceramic plates, use parody and humor to approach the war’s difficult legacy. The eight plates are in the style of traditional blue and white Delft tableware, but they are far from conventional. Each displays in its center a different satirical scene that is telling of the curious and often problematic way in which we remember the Civil War in the American South.

STATEMENT

With Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, America’s war-damaged psyche went down into history. There it was buried, but, like so many Civil War soldiers, it was never laid to rest. Its aqueous memory, known today as The Lost Cause, still ruptures and rumbles beneath the surface of time, occasionally spilling out into grim national headlines. This portfolio presents the ways in which I have, through visual language, confronted the vestiges of the South's antebellum culture. My work evolved as my country’s racial climate changed before my eyes, and I responded by studying civil war memory and its present-day ramifications. These paintings investigate my home country’s way of remembering the painful, internal conflict we call the Civil War.

STATEMENT

Espoused forever to its history, the South lives on. As an idea, it is perpetually covered in the dust of its antebellum sins. In the wake of these wrongdoings is a contemporary South fraught with racial tension, shame, and violence. My art confronts these issues by addressing the idea of privilege. I invite the viewer to get lost in the opulence of brush strokes and subject matter alike. Such beauty and decadence formed the vocabulary of the region’s antebellum heyday. But it wasn’t for all: some lived in luxury, while others lived in chains.

Known today as the Holy City, Charleston, SC, was America’s busiest slave port. Whilst living there, this haunted the back of my mind. Still, as I toured the city’s grand plantations and house museums, I was star-struck. I’m hopelessly attracted to the era’s flamboyant antiques, gilded cornices, and Rococo trappings. The quality of the craftsmanship, unparalleled by most contemporary efforts (or lack thereof), is aesthetic rapture. It’s beautiful, but at what human cost?

My paintings are attempts to raise consciousness about the nuances one faces as he or she really studies America’s colonial antiquities. It’s my own tension. I feel a love for the era’s time-honored decadence as much as I feel the guilt of being a modern Southern belle.