The mechanism of unpickability
I presented my research archive of images of Susanna and the Elders produced between 1250 and 1750 as a work in its own right, building a side altar, including a devotional painting, and an offering.
A side altar: dark but for a spotlit altarcloth bearing in the center: a ViewMaster. Next to this: and intact personal archive purchased from Ebay, someone who loved traveling through northern Europe in the 1960s and 70s. This archive is augmented with five newly produced ViewMaster reels bearing different images of Susanna and the Elders, accompanied by a devotional oil painting of my left ear: Installation Point, 20 x 14 cm.
3200, that’s how many objects I find produced between 1250 and 1750 bearing the story of Susanna and the Elders. Tapestries, medallions, paintings.
I look at my studio wall, a cold case running across centuries, and these Elders, serial abusers who keep showing up and trying to rape her. This is not a painting of a righteous woman being saved from wicked judges by a smart young god-touched boy.
These are paintings of terror. Of the moment. Of the unique cascade of conflicting emotions and impulses, perceived duties, and very real fears. These are paintings of a woman bathing in the privacy of her home who is invaded, told to be silent, threatened, and stripped nude. These are paintings of trauma.
It took a moment for me to realize what I was looking at, but these images teach. Mary Garrard writes they …” offer instruction to the wife while serving as a convenient source of pornography for the husband." It was an extremely popular wedding gift.
This gift purported to preach piety and virtue but showed violence and subjugation. This is gaslighting at an Epic scale. This is documentation of five hundred years of bias being embedded into society in plain sight. But if it was embedded, it can be taken back out, unpicked, examined, discarded.
