Best in show is a tough call, but my vote goes to Peter Waite of Glastonbury for what is essentially a bizarre and obsessive pursuit: a mixed-media assemblage of a "death ship" made of scavenged trash and studio junk — old paint tubes, brushes, cans, sunglasses, paper, plastic bottles, glue.
The captain's commission is an insurance scam, a leaky death ship.
Studying the words of the warehouse and professional workers side-by-side, one sees how similar many of their grievances are; each is united by the fact that membership in the Amazon "team" is a sentence upon an immiserating death ship.
Over the years, some reporters have called the San Diego the Death Ship, a nickname Bielenda finds unjust.
The death ship became a touchstone for his darkly comedic art and a metaphor for life's grand indifference to the living.
HMNZT Tahiti, the worst affected ship in the convoy, was referred to as the death ship, and a Court of Inquiry was held to investigate this outbreak.
The absurd and the appalling are perfectly joined -- as are the deftly assembled wood, glass and brass -- in such unforgettable sculptures as "Death Ship Runover by a '66 Lincoln Continental" (1966).
This show, the first to isolate Westermann's treatment of the death ship theme, provides an excellent introduction to his consummate artistic skills, sardonic fatalism and weirdly fierce joie de vivre (Smith).
Here, "Swingin' Red King," a giant figure in stacked and enamelled pine molding, presides over one-off marvels including the boxed, sinister "Death Ship of No Port with a List".
The death ship theme fascinated Westermann as a child and was hard-wired into his psyche as a marine in the Pacific during World War II.
We know only a few things about him for sure: that he wrote great novels like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Death Ship; that he lived, at least for a time, and died in Mexico; and that he was a politically engaged writer who cared deeply about working and common people.
