Saturday, October 18, 2008

IconI [1]


IconI

I am not my heart.
My heart is meat.
My essence is an artichoke.

I created this piece to represent multiplicity of identity, which is a theme that I have a lot of interest in. In "The Event of Becoming," Jewelle L. Gomez wrote, “But people are not artichokes. It is very helpful in a therapeutic situation to peel each leaf and get to the heart of what has formed personality. But in human social interaction it is by exploring the full construction and interaction of the layers of character that we find the heart. To twist an old geometry principle – the whole equals more than the sum of its parts.”
I am a queer Christian artist. While these are just a few of my identities, these are the ones I chose to portray in this piece, as well as the idea of multiplicity as a whole. I chose the image of “The Immaculate Heart of Mary” because I always thought it was interesting that in a lot of Catholic Icons, it is the heart that is emphasized. The baby Jesus is holding a piece of steak to represent that the heart, like our bodies, is just a piece of meat, and it does not really define who we are or what we do. Mary is holding an artichoke because artichokes represent multiplicity and layering of identities in my mind.

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