What's Mine is Yours What's Yours is Mine, 2013
2013
painting
27" x 36"
oil on canvas
The dummy performs its own undoing. Its hands — extensions of itself — become alien presences: one taunts, one devours. The horror is that there is no other. The tormentor and the tormented share the same body, wrapped in red, white, and blue.
This is the paradox of a self that cannot recognize itself. The puppet-hands enact what ideology always conceals: that the forces consuming us are our own — our appetites, our cruelties, our willful unknowing.
Mine and yours collapse. Property, identity, blame — all dissolve when the hand that wounds is the hand being wounded.