By Hilary Beall
1st Place, Visual (2D), Create | Encounter
Artist Statement:
9x12in. acrylic on canvas featuring an image of a nude woman with her hands behind her back, facing downward. Her body is depicted in bright red and yellow to imply violence, anger, and humiliation. Just as described in the Gospel, the image represents a woman facing humiliation and death to satisfy the bloodlust of an immoral and enraged mob (this image loosely references the conflicts and protests in Iran in which women are being arrested, kidnapped, beaten and killed for the “crime” of their hair being visible among other morality “violations”). The images from Iran have shaken me to my core as an American woman with immense privilege and it is not lost on me that in many nations, women today face similarly brutal humiliation and torturous punishment largely unchanged from thousands of years ago.