The archetype of Judgement probes existential questions that ask what is the moral price of freedom, what is the cost of violence and war.
In The Last Judgment project, I survey these questions through a wide variety of materials, for their symbolic qualities of transparency or obscurity in relation to my subject, giving more thought to substance than to style.
This series started with a conversation I had with a veteran, recently returned from Iraq. One of the many GIs now entering the college population, the young woman was struggling with reintegration into civilian life. She suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and clinical depression. I wanted to help her but felt powerless to do so. I thought about the transformative power of art and asked her to model for me. Then I asked others, casting these young veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to pose as the different characters in Michelangelo’s masterpiece, The Last Judgment.
Other versions have since followed, each exploring a tangent only suggested by that first reenactment. These tangents form clusters of inquiry: Judgments, Prophets, Lamentations, Queror, Preserve, Liberties, Rites, Veils, and Gardens.
I have no answers and there is still so much to ask, so much to research to ask for the veterans I befriended. For me. For all of us.