On Your Knees Baby
For my final project in Advanced Media, I was allowed to create a sculpture of my own design. This is the second time designing my own project without restrictions, and I was really excited.
I started out the project by doing some sketches and just trying to brainstorm some potential ideas for the project.
Some of the initial ideas I explored were working with projection, abstract sculptures made from wire, combining found objects. Some ideas I was thinking of exploring were continuing my experimentation in how color can affect mood, modern racism from an ally’s perspective, mental illness, and sexual violence.
I kept finding myself back at ideas surrounding sexual violence. Specifically sexual assault and harassment. Things I have experienced in my own life.
There were two main things I really wanted to achieve with this piece. The first was to put the viewer in a vulnerable place. Not to be cruel or to upset set them, but to open them up to understanding. Many say it’s something you can never really understand until you’ve experienced it. It’s something very taboo to talk about. No one wants to sit down and talk about this, no one wants to know how much it really happens. I wanted to simulate similar emotions but in a safe way. So those people who have never experienced that kind of vulnerability before could experience a sliver of it.
The second was to start a conversation about Sexual Assault and Harassment. To tell a bit of my story, and other people’s stories too. It by no means makes us who we are, but it’s a box we carry everywhere we go and everywhere we will go.
The original concept behind the box had font on the outside that said “Get on your knees.” and a collage of close-up pictures of Penis’s, and quotes from my life. The box would be hung low enough to the ground, that the only way to see the inside would be to get on your knees and peer into it.
I ended up moving away from the collage idea. I think I was drawn to it because I have used it in the past, and am quite fond of it. But it weakened the piece, seeing a collage took the viewer out of the piece a little too much. I also wanted to have some sort of intimacy involved with the piece. Because normally sexual acts are supposed to be pleasurable and good, with someone you trust enough to be intimate with.
Another reason I wanted a sense of intimacy was that when things like this happen, they are most often with someone you know and trust. We often teach our children to stay away from strangers, but we never prepare them enough for when it’s their co-worker, best friend, or even lover.
I decided to simulate a blow job, this is because it is meant to be an intimate thing, but it is often one of the first things twisted into something grotesque. I similarly changed the words from “Get on your knees” to “On your knees baby.” Because Baby is an endearing term for someone you care about, and now it’s being used by the person doing harm. tainting it.
For the actual building of the project, I started with a maquette, in which I took a series of boxes I had for moving and drew Penis’s on the inside of. I then had friends put them over their head to get the feel of it. I also used wooden slabs to play around with size, and get a plan together for how I was going to build the overall box.
I then moved into building the box and finding the pictures for the inside.
After my box was assembled, I created a false top to hide my LEDS, then attached them to the false top.
Something else I did for this was a tone of material studies. How I was going to attach the photos to the inside of the wood, as well as what I was going to write the quotes in.
Something I had debated when working on this was whether to get rid of the wording on the outside or keep it. I had decided it was important to keep because though this piece was supposed to make the viewer uncomfortable, the main goal was not to shock them. Also because I felt it was more realistic, and didn’t take away from the impact of the imagery on the inside. I think as a society we like to say we never saw it coming, but a lot of the time there are warning signs and red flags. We just ignore them, it’s a lot harder to let ourselves believe that someone we love or trust would be willing to do that. It’s easy for us to laugh it off as a joke that went too far, or a misunderstanding. But most of the time it’s not, and it was there, as bold as black paint in big letters. We just didn’t realize it until it was too late. I wanted to have the viewers have an idea of what they were getting themselves into.
While I had been working in the studio to finalize my visual ideas, I had also reached out to people on my social media.
I wanted to give people the option to share their stories. To put these things that had happened to them somewhere, so they didn’t have to carry them alone as secrets any longer. I didn’t know if anyone would be willing to reach out, and at first, I was really nervous about posting it. I think part of me feared having to stand alone with this, but not even after 20 minutes of posting. I had people start to reach out. I’m going to include the stories of each quote here because even though they aren’t apart of the piece, I do think they are important, and hearing them made this a lot more real for me.
“I’m sorry I was too touchy with you today, it’s a compliment to you. I was born to love you.”
“TOUCH ME HERE, TOUCH MY DICK!”
The first quote was said to someone by their boyfriend at the time. Prior to their relationship, they had been sexually assaulted and harassed by someone else, and they were struggling with being touched without permission. After numerous times of explaining this to their boyfriend and attempting to set the boundary, this was their partner’s response.
The second one was yelled at them while doing volunteer work as a young teen by an elderly man who they were assisting.
“You let it happen.”
“You didn’t try hard enough to stop it.”
The person who sent me this did not confide their story in me, but honestly the quotes alone were enough.
“Does your Boyfriend eat your pussy? If you want to know what it feels like let me know, I’m an expert in pussy eating.”
“Please? I can tell you’re Wet.”
“It could have been worse.”
These were quotes from my life. The first had been said to me as a 16-year-old working at a local IHop. It had been said to me by my manager, who was in his 30’s. I don’t think my boyfriend and I at the time had even had sex yet. We were alone at the restaurant at the time, rolling silverware after closing. I drove him home after, I was too afraid of him not to. He tried to convince me to come in and have a couple of drinks with him, maybe get high. I think back to that moment a lot, and how lucky I was that he didn’t try and force me.
The second was something my best friend had said to me before he had tried to reach down my pants and touch me. I had already said not several times, and it wasn’t until I burst out crying and his mom came to check on us that he stopped. I had frozen at the time, and after he had gotten her to go away he apologized profusely and said that he hadn’t known that I wanted him to stop. That it was a mistake and he was sorry. I believed him. I believed because I hadn’t been assertive enough when saying no and that I hadn’t tried to push him off of me it was really my fault, and that he wasn’t a bad guy. We were only 15 at the time. Two years later, in our junior year, he tried to force one of my friends to give him a blow job. I blamed myself for it happening to her for the longest time, because if I had spoken up about it maybe it wouldn’t have happened.
The last was something I heard growing up a lot. I was sexually assaulted by a 17-year-old boy when I was about 5, or 6. It was at a daycare facility at my school. At least he didn’t kill me, at least he didn’t rape me. I was lucky that he only made me touch him, only made me french kiss him. I was lucky. He had also been sexually abused by his father, and his brother was also in jail for similar issues. I wonder if they told him he was lucky too.
“Be careful or I’m going to slap that pretty little ass of yours. Bend you right over my knee.”
“That’s what you get for not smiling at me.”
“If you ever tell someone what I did to you, I’m going to kill you.”
The first one was said to this person by their boss when they were a teenager. The second two were said to them by their ex-boyfriend while they had been dating.
“This isn’t the fault of both parties, like you said earlier, you really led him on.”
“This is a wake up call.”
“In all honesty you have no right to bitch about what you invited him to do.”
“You should focus more on bettering yourself so it doesn’t happen again, rather than focusing on the fragment that was his fault.”
These were all pulled from a sea of screenshots sent to me by a friend. They had been sexually assaulted and when they told one of their friends about it, their friend had belittled them and told them it had been their fault. Taking it a step further even, and saying the fact that they had told another person about what happened was bad-mouthing the guy, and they didn’t have any right too.
I painted these quotes in red paint mixed with water around the imager of the penis, and once dry placed them into the box.
From there I attached the hangers and hung the piece ready for Critique.
All in all, I have mixed feelings about the piece. Though it was my most popular piece among students and I like how it came out, after the critique and trying to enter it into the show I could tell a lot of what I was going for was lost. It was my intention for the outside of the box to be unkempt and badly made, as it reinforced the ideas I was addressing. A lot of people just saw it as a thrown-together attempt at Shock Art. I didn’t want to make it pretty because Rape and sexual assault are not pretty things. It should be uncomfortable to look at, and unappealing. I also didn’t want to use people’s reality simply as a way to get a reaction from the viewer. It was supposed to make the viewer uncomfortable, but it was never meant to be shock art. I’d like to push this idea further and try to figure out a way to make the bad craft side of things more intentional.