Fragility Trap

Venus Fragility Trap, 2022, hand-stitched DMC floss on dishtowel remnant, 15" x 6.5"

 

"It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.” 

― Franz Kafka, The Trial 

The idea for 'Venus Fragility Trap' came to me when I was stitching my small 'Head of Venus' (5"x4", second photo). I had seen aerial photographs of mass graves in South America because of the Covid pandemic, and I was struck by both the visual beauty of the pattern of the caskets and the incredible, deep sadness of it. I stitched tears down the face of Venus: even Beauty grieves for the world. Those tears, however, prompted an association with a current neo-racist discourse about *white tears*, especially ''white women's tears''. It struck me how pernicious it is to take an entire group of unique individuals, define them as a monolithic identity, and weaponize a human emotion against them. 

I created it using stitched words mainly referenced from the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka and the nonfiction book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. It examines a dehumanizing ideology that uses logical fallacies and circular 'Kafka Traps' in language to perpetuate itself. This piece confronts these limiting concepts with a contrasting beauty/Beauty which represents both individual beingness (I Am That I Am) and a universal human story (mythological Venus). I placed the stitched language symbolically- the sentences from The Trial are on the upper part of the background and act as satirical observation, while those placed among the coffins on the lower part are taken from White Fragility, and contain the notion of a deadening and dead-end belief system. The repeating phrases (different iterations of *whiteness*: white fragility, white tears, white ignorance, etc.) that I stitched on the figure become only a superficial imposition rather than an obscuration of something essential. My original intention was that the meaning of the language should be immediately discernable. Instead, the words are part of the design itself, making this piece less like a cudgel and more like an invitation.