Sights and Insights
This composite photograph is a new addition to my “Seven Deadly Sins” series and will be appear in my upcoming show at Clay on Main in Oley, PA. The opening is January 8, 2017, 4-6 PM.
To read more about this piece go here. To preview the whole series with commentary go here.
(The composite was created by combining and digitally blending still shots I made of video from Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution and The Normal Heart.)
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; and Lust – Last Tango in Paris and 9 1/2 Weeks.
