Part of the Building a Better Baphomet exhibition at Joshua Tree Art Gallery, September 2018.

The gods and monsters of our time are in serious need of an overhaul. Once again, they’ve oozed down into a limited number of monolithic shapes, familiar as they are pedestrian. They’ve melded into one giant repeat – like a television show in syndication, a tweet retweeted ad nauseum, a spaceship in endless orbit. So let’s forego the rehab of those old saws. Let’s instead go intrepid and imagine something well beyond the dialectic. And what better resource to enlist in such a lark than Baphomet – that pagan, written and written again hybrid of an idol. Using the goat-headed, transgendered god/dess of alchemy, satanism, the occult and the heretical, we at least free ourselves from so many pitfalls of thesis-antithesis-synthesis bullshit. To that end, I present The Baphomet Queens and their Minions.

The Baphomet Queens consist of 10 hives – a queen and minions. All images are public domain or clandestinely mined from my family photo albums. The Baphomet Queens show ladies in various states of typical female roles, except with a goat head to call out those molds as ill-fitting and, at times, if inhabited perfectly, received parodoxically as somewhat malevolent. Choose your favorite and, instead of worshipping them, let them whisper nonsensical phrases in your ear and see what your brain does with it.

Each 15.25″ x 15.25″ x 1.5″

laminate, paper, hex nuts, cap head screws, metal, wood