Liberty Life embodies the inherited skills of colonial metalworking that underpinned significant parts of American identity, and simultaneously reflects upon the alienation of LGBTQIA identities during the construction of liberty and democracy in America. The artist sees domestic objects as symbols of nourishment and growth, and deliberately subverts such identifications in his work, highlighting dissonances between ideals of liberty and those who occupy marginalized identities. Coming of age as a gay American in the 1970s and 80s, Jonathon Wahl remembers the Bicentennial as a particular inflection point, especially the efflorescence of Americana at that time. He thought about the notion of Manifest Destiny, as well as the tools that created the country and settled the 13 states. He thinks of tinware as “a critiqueable part of colonial craft culture.” Similarly, slogans--such as the one that decorates this work, “Liberty Life”--are signifiers of patriotism but also part of consciousness-raising, such as those used during the AIDS crisis. Wahl recalls growing up with a lack of legislation around gay rights (he notes in particular the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy of the US military). The holes in his tinware act as a metaphor for being unable to live fully out as a gay man. He sees these as domestic objects connected to nourishment and growth, but their metaphorical meaning is the things that he was not fed or did not know as he grew up. Wahl made the patterns for the tinware himself, looked at an early American tinware catalog from Winterthur, and also went and consulted with a Montgomery, PA country tinware maker.

---