La Bestia: Sweet Mother 2013-2014

Check out the theatrical production HERE

These paintings are part of a multi-media exploration of the earliest creation myths, recast for our era.  The central themes emerge from the first conceptions of creation – those explored in the myths of pre-Abrahamic religions such as Babylonian, Hindu and Greek – coupled with Jewish texts.  These original, violent and creative ideas continue to reverberate across social, ethnic, economic and political boundaries. This work was created when I was a Fellow at the LABA House of Jewish Culture, at the 14th Street Y, in NYC’s East Village.

The paintings are based on my play by the same name, which explores the interrelationship between creation and destruction in these earliest tales and, indeed, within contemporary human experience.   The three main characters – Suzette, an American who works for the CIA; Valencia, a Honduran immigrant and Huma, a Syrian freedom fighter – have all both created life and will destroy it during the course of this narrative.

The plot is set in Washington D.C., the Texas desert and Damascus, Syria and explores three different stories, which coalesce at the end of the work.  Suzette, female worker in America’s security apparatus, is asked, for reasons of State, to commit what normally would be considered an atrocity.  The mother of a small child, she has been asked to kill a pregnant woman in the Arab world who has been identified, by intercepted though misinterpreted communications, as a terrorist plotting the downfall of America.

Her maid, Valencia is an illegal Hispanic immigrant.  She had to abandon her only child in the Texas desert when she escaped into the United States from Mexico (after having ridden La Bestia freight train illegally from Guatemala to the U.S. border).  She has been variously abused and humiliated as an illegal immigrant, and only at the end finds her voice and her power.

The third story is the woman who is to be killed, a Muslim freedom fighter who writes a clandestine radio program as the voice of Free Syria.  Educated and politicized, she has assumed an anonymous public persona via a radio program which is broadcast using the voice of her male lover.  She is renowned throughout the Arab world as a great male revolutionary.  Her dark secret is not this work, but the fact that she had her abusive husband killed and has taken up with a younger man who killed him.

These differing conceptions of creation/destruction are woven together with a sung libretto, paintings (all produced by myself), an interpretive modern dancer, as well as the musical score.  The work, set in the contemporary world, is suffused with the primal myths that continue to affect our understanding of religion, spirituality and society.  This multi-media exploration brings ancient insight to bear on contemporary political and social issues.

All works acrylic, ink, collage on canvas, 24” x 12”, 2013-14. Price on Request.