RETRIBUTE
Images of women and children being rounded up one cold night along the Rio Grande in 2019 impelled Retribute.
The asylum seekers had been given mylar emergency blankets and were huddled in groups, wrapped in the thin sheets which shimmered in the headlights of Border Patrol buses.
Seeing migrant people being given government issued blankets and being reminded of the words “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” motivated me to respond.
Retribute, installation, 2020, 516 Gallery
In this work, the blankets that held empty promises and pseudo protection have become energizing cloaks, imbuing power. A visual explosion of feminine power propels these New World Furies into the world, to wreak vengeance and justice as their Greek counterparts did.
Three beeswax figures made to scale, two Valdivia goddesses and one Inka goddess, replicate the earliest known images of females in the Americas. This work reflects my continuing search for uncorrupted pre contact Indigenous culture. Matrilineal traditions guide, empower and provoke change – rejecting patriarchal foundations and colonial conventions.
