Monday, January 28, 2013

Post square 012813 ~ The Mourner's Dress

Yesterday 230 people died in a fire at a nightclub in Santa Maria, Brazil.

When I started this project of, every day, taking a square inch of the front page photo of the Washington Post and turning it into an abstract drawing, I'm not sure how much I considered that some of the topics would be difficult. Like the soldier's story yesterday, and this tragedy today.

Yesterday, when I saw that the photo was from a video of a soldier under attack, initially I thought that I shouldn't do my project because I was afraid it might be taken as exploitive or disrespectful. But I decided that what I am doing is acknowledging. Terrible things happen, and they happen so often that I feel sometimes I'm enured to much of what I hear or read about, simply because it is so much. What doing this project makes me do is sit with the idea of what I'm drawing... and think about it. A practice of empathy.

This detail from the photo is not actually the fabric of the mourner's dress. It's part of the wreath placed by the coffin. The woman kneeling beside it is wearing a flowered blouse. Not the standard and depressing total black garb we don here in the US to attend a funeral.


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