“Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment”
Julia C. Butridge Gallery
“… why do we kill, what happens to our humanity, and to us, as a culture.”
Thus opened this exhibition of works in various media by Malaquias Montoya, who here took up the venerable and important role of the artist as social critic. A series of wall panels in large red text on black backgrounds made the artist’s point abundantly clear, just in case the texts on the artwork left his position in doubt. The artist, at his best, translated his strength of conviction into potent gestural force. The Victim, one such, was a color silk screen with a powerfully drawn skeletal head and shoulders layered with text regarding the negative transformation of our society through institutionalized acts of vengeful violence. A painting, Ruth Snyder, First Woman Executed, Sing Sing Prison, 1928, revealed some of the same intensely expressive draftsmanship, particularly in the depiction of the head. This head image was twice duplicated to the left, using a silkscreen process, in a manner that brought to mind an aftershock. This technique provided compositional force to the piece.
Also notable in the show were several crisper works, notably The Executioner, an image of a doctor with an executioner’s hood. The piece commented on the egregious ethics of medical complicity in this procedure. The use of silk screens or serigraphs for this graphic communication of ideas is quite appropriate and sensitive to the history of the medium. The show was notable not only for the art, but also for the challenge it offered the viewer to consider deeply a topic it would be much more comfortable to forget.
This article appears in February 4 • 2005.