August 7, 2022

Habeous Wokus Corpus

Habeous Wokus Corpus, 2022, hand-stitched embroidery floss on vintage linen tablecloth, 15"x11"


 

"You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” --Alexander Solzhenitsyn




This piece is about language in the service of a 'progressive' ideology that divides humanity into identity groups vying for power, and which attempts to erase both the unique individual and the universal human. I stitched words, taken from the new Left's ideological lexicon, onto a mummy form with a gaslight on its head and a trap at its feet. I imagine that the words are spiraling down into the trap form, symbolizing how a Postmodern redefinition of language and meaning, disconnected from reality, contracts the world and eventually becomes a conceptual dead-end. The background represents the openness (swirling energy) and mystery (treasure chest), outside of those limiting beliefs.