The Sea Shanty II

Over the last seven years we’ve heard all about underwater mortgages. They are an enduring legacy of the Great Recession. Imagine yourself having lost your house in one of those subprime mortgages. You had lost it all after struggling to keep your home afloat. Your downward spiral continues further and first leads to unemployment and then homelessness. You end up living “down by the river” in a shantytown. Now imagine that your shanty was built upon a sinking boat, a World War II U-boat in this case. That’s what I think about when I saw this photo of Dan’s latest work, what I’m calling his “Sea Shanty II”.

Dan is in a show this week, in Torrance, California. Here he has revisited a work that he created in Saint Louis, the “Sea Shanty”. Like the original work, this one also features an eclectic collection of shacks and tents, a shantytown, all precariously perched upon the back of a plastic German U-boat model. In his previous work, he used a US Gato class model. Both pieces have different shantytowns, but there are similarities. Both works feature exquisitely modeled structures and both have an outhouse on the fantail. Now wait for it, like in when the sh!t hits the fan.