B-Sides: SHAHEEN Modern and contemporary art, Cleveland, OH

B-side

Harley Davidson, 2024

Nicotine, alcoholic cocktail and metallic gold silkscreen ink on canvas

14 x 16 inches 

My mother’s brother loved motorcycles. I made this work from a photograph of his Harley parked out in front of his refrigeration business. He rode motorcycles, collected them and when he was younger, bought them used, fixed them up and sold them. There were many photographs taken over the years with my mother and uncle posed on or around his various motorcycles. The bikers my mother hung around when I was in high school were a rough crowd and nothing like my uncle. They were all border line criminals, or actual criminals, stupid crimes that usually involved substance abuse or low level violence. My uncle loved the motorcycle as a vehicle and as a machine to maintain, he didn’t care about the Easy Rider culture surrounding it. But my mother loved all that. She loved to skirt near that kind of criminality and dysfunction, just as near as she could get without falling into it herself. But she fell in. By the end of her life those people completely engulfed her.

This work was made in Painesville, OH and Brooklyn, NY.