General Physical Description note: Photographic art; Image size: 20 x 16 in.
Other Descriptive Information
“'X-ed Out with Thorns' was the simple frontal presentation of death and memory. There is a 'thorn ball' above and between
the X, and there are thorns inside the X: death and pain. Over that is the flower and on it the gauze. The flower is remembrance,
the gauze is a shroud. As in Juan’s introduction to Chicano Poetry, the only fitting response to death is elegy, memory. Flowers
always take the part of consolation, tribute and remembrance at funerals and afterwards at the cemetery. So in my photos they
represent elegy and remembrance. However, unlike Juan’s verbal elegies, flowers are themselves terminal, which is very appropriate
to photography. The flowers too will die, or as Roland Barthes has said in Camera Lucida (a major source of inspiration for
me always): 'The only way I can transform the Photograph is into refuse: either the drawer or the wastebasket. Not only does
it commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal:
like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages…Attacked
by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away. Earlier societies managed
so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal:
this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of ‘what has been’,
modern society has renounced the Monument. A paradox: the same century that invented History and Photography. But History
is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the
Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no
longer able to conceive ‘duration’, affectively or symbolically….' (p. 93) And yes, I do think of my photographs as documents
about time, even though they document a very personal time." -Kathy Vargas
This is a centered photographic art print. At the center of the piece is a photographed image of a thorn ball on its stem
with two leaves, one pointing up and the other pointing down, in varying charcoal grey shades. On top of the thorn ball image
are two branches with thorns that cross over each other creating an "x" shape in a dark brown shade. Embedded on top of the
thorn ball image is a loose threaded maroon design.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Vargas , Kathy