Installations | Howard Skrill Art

Robert Moses is the embodiment of masculine dominance personified. A fitting 2025-25 motif. Moses spent a consider effort attempting to destroy Red Hook's mostly poor residents with his damnable highways.

This is an installation principally of works created in a two week residency at Mother's Milk in Newton, Kansas and installed in late September 2025 at BWAC in Brooklyn.

The majority of those works, strips of paper attached to a wall, were inundated with water during the fire at 481 Van Brunt St. in Red Hook, Brooklyn in Late September 2025.

I knew I was showing these works in Red Hook, Brooklyn and chose Robert Moses, therefore, as my muse.

The works are in triage and their fate is uncertain. Since my work concerns palimpsests and the trauma of the past, manifest in memory as embodied in effigies, their fate has a resonance with my other threads .Their absence feels like a lost limb.

Another Newton resident, Jamie, made forms sculpted in glue and plaster on fabric of the absence shapes of pieces of furniture to explore the limits of memory.

She placed in the fields of the Newton farm of our residency to collapse in time. I drew the shapes in plein-air. I added the image as a head to a motif that I created in plein-air many times, the World War II memorial in Cadman Park in Brooklyn.

I have drawn the warrior figure personifying a male and the female, cradling a grieving child and holding a laurel wreath, many times. This time I cut out the shape of the female figure in the capacious studio in Newton and attached the head.

I was scheduled to participate in Gowanus Open Studios in mid October at King Killer, a capacious space in South Gowanus. My intent was reinstall the works from the September of my works from the Newton residency at King Killer. I needed to create a whole new installation with a tight time frame. This is it and includes mostly works on paper, cut up plein-air drawings and new works on paper drilled into cheap canvas backgrounds as I got interested in the paper extending past the canvas borders and the screws and other hardware visible.

My favorite work from Newton was Robert Moses' body from his effigy at Robert Moses State Park with a eagle head from a thrift store in Newton otherwise transforming him. This image is on the prime real estate of the site's front page. Most won't be reading this. Studies suggest that people with attention spans, only spent a couple of minutes on any old web site including this one. What if you attempt humor in a forest and nobody hears it?

Our current Moses wanna-be in a work on paper drilled to canvas, displays his triumphal arch design for the grand celebration of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration's 250's anniversary is in 2026.

The wanna-be seeks to tear down the republic for which it stands. Replacing it with triumphal arches and other imperial foo-foo.

I made the image overnight during the overnight between the two days of the OS.

The image recalls the scene in Spinal Tap when the guys want to reconstruct a piece of Stonehenge for their act. An inscription error results in a foot and a half monolith. Small people dance and knock it over. I wrote Stonehenge on the arm of the wanna-be.

Moses pent a consider effort attempting to destroy Red Hook's mostly poor residents with his damnable highways and poor people vertical islands. On a discarded poster frame found on the street of a model wearing bangles. I pasted a kinda portrait.

I Showed it during the rainy Red Hook Open Studio weekend a couple of weeks after the fire. Many of these folks lost the physical embodiments of their legacies. I lost a few months work.

We all showed in a special but spectacularly sad exhibition at a co-working site in a newer building in gentrifying Red Hook. Self interest being the only force that can bring down the brok...power brokers..