Here are several more pictures from my upcoming show at Art Plus Gallery “Seven Deadly Sins, Plus.” The series is composed of digital collages produced by shooting stills of video trailers, mostly posted on YouTube, and combining them with shots from other videos, news clips, classic photographs, and original photographs “shot in the wild.” The hope is to address not just the classic Seven Deadly Sins popularized in the writings of Dante and Chaucer and referenced many other times by artists, but also to address other, often more deadly sins eminating from the present social order. For previously posted images in this series see to Week No. 4.
Continuing the series “Seven Deadly Sins Plus” that I’ve been working on, this is one of my most recent additions. Intended as a commentary on the permanent state of war that is a feature of Pax Americana, this piece combines shots of several scenes from each “Apocalypse Now” and “Restrepo.” The title is a play on a crudely and naively jingoist poem by Oscar Wilde, Ave Imperatrix dated 1881, written in at the time of the British empire’s wars to subdue Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan. On first reading, and from where we stand today, the poem appears almost satirical…almost a caricature…alas! Wilde used the feminine form since the imperial ruler at the time was Queen Victoria. The male form seems more appropriate in our time.
The final stanza makes clear that the “socialist” Wilde stands with Victorian imperialism’s war aims.
In this series, I’ve combined still photographs I’ve made of segments of two or more movies or trailers, sometimes with other original work, to create a composition which is a critical photo-essay about the original productions and their broader relevance in social terms, from my point of view.
from Ave Imperatrix by Oscar Wilde
SET in this stormy Northern sea,
Queen of these restless fields of tide,
England! what shall men say of thee,
Before whose feet the worlds divide?
The earth, a brittle globe of glass, Lies in the hollow of thy hand,
And through its heart of crystal pass,
Like shadows through a twilight land,
The spears of crimson-suited war,
The long white-crested waves of fight,
And all the deadly fires which are
The torches of the lords of Night….
Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet?
Where is our English chivalry?
Wild grasses are their burial-sheet,
And sobbing waves their threnody.
O loved ones lying far away,
What word of love can dead lips send!
O wasted dust! O senseless clay!
Is this the end! is this the end!
Peace, peace! we wrong the noble dead
To vex their solemn slumber so;
Though childless, and with thorn-crowned head,
Up the steep road must England go,
Yet when this fiery web is spun,
Her watchmen shall descry from far
The young Republic like a sun
Rise from these crimson seas of war.
These are the first five pieces in a series I will be exhibiting later this year. The Preliminary title of the show is Seven Deadly Sins: 13 Pieces. The first piece in this series was completed in 2008 and shown at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in a group show under the aegis of the Pittsburgh Society of Artists entitled Saligia: Seven Deadly Sins. I decided to return to this theme with a series of my own after seeing Jamie Wyeth’s Seven Deadly Sins paintings on cardboard using seagulls as subjects.
There have been many ways of artistically interpreting the Seven Deadly Sins identified by 4th Century Christian monks over the centuries. In his Inferno, Dante arranged Purgatory according to the spiritual transgressions of Greed, Lust, Pride, Gluttony, Wrath, Envy, and Sloth. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also mentions them in the Parson’s Tale.
I hope to complete this series with several additional interpretations of deadly sins, less spiritual in nature, based in the real world of today — that is the sins of modern class society: environmental destruction, Islamaphobia & Anti-Semitism, racism & police violence, imperialist war, homophobia, and violence against women in addition to the pieces on genocide and capitalist greed.
I’ve created these by photographing videos, either production or trailers, at a relatively slow shutter speed to capture some of the action and compositing them in layers with scenes from a second video. Films referenced are for: Genocidal Wrath – Hotel Rwanda and Killing fields; Gluttony – Eat, Pray, Love, 9 1/2, and Tom Jones ; Pride – Legend of the Black Scorpion and Phantom of the Opera; Capitalist Greed – The Wolf of Wall Street and Chicago;andLust – Last Tango in Paris and 9 1/2 Weeks.
Blue Sky, Blue IceBlue Sky, Blue SnowBlue SnowBlue Sky, Barn, and House
Continuing my experiments with developing infrared photographs with a false color scheme I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The first photo of a patch of ice in a wheat field (before the snow when the wheat sprouts were still bright green) illustrates this best. Not only does the sky appear blue when the red and blue channels are switched, but so does ice and snow, reflecting the color of the sky. In the last photo with the barn and house, there is only a bit of snow in the scene, in the immediate foreground. I decided to desaturate it in this case.
