Scandal
mixed media on paper 30/40
SCANDAL
The division was in my mind or so I thought. The accusations came when my mother rejected me. It was her full breasts, the ones exposed in the tub - the ones she wore the night of the wedding. The street was dark. It was always dark in Duluth even when the sun shone. On the weather channel the woman in red always said the day would be dark. I think they played a recording, it cost less that way. There would be no consequences for the sin unless the sun shone which it did December 9th. I didn’t recognize my face in the sunlight. I wondered who it was. For a minute I looked like a man and grimaced in fear not knowing where I had left my disguise. To be seen in full-bellied lust would divide me like a dartboard into black and white, the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral. Judgment would be passed and I would remember how our skin almost touched and the taste of her. I wondered where the edge was from which I plummeted waking up to a psychological illusionary trauma and the only thing I could see was her massive nipple. And I thought – what the hell mom?
Scandal = rejection of a societal group (a form of judgment) here depicted as a mother rejecting her child. Gender change = disassociation of self and the rejection of one of the two people one must be. Conformity is found intolerable and the resulting rejection more intolerable still. This is what the work is about.