Foam, gypsum cement, LED lights, electronics. 6’ x 35” x 30”, 2025
Graduate
An apparition of Jesus, known as the Divine Mercy, appeared to the Polish peasant nun Maria Faustyna Kowalska in 1931. In this vision, Jesus stood with his hands in a gesture of grace and two rays of light emerged from his chest, representing the flow of blood and water – as occurred when a solider stabbed him with a spear after dying upon the cross (John 19:34). Growing up in a Polish immigrant community in Ontario, I often encountered this image in the homes of my relatives.
In my sculpture the rays of light have been reformed into the strobe of police lights, co-mingling two institutions responsible for controlling the behavior and norms of the social strata: the Catholic Church and police. Mercy is dispensed from a position of power, with a presumed offense, wrong-doing, or sin in need of repentance and finally remission. It is characterized by a sense of grace and discretion, in responding with compassion and restraining the application of deserved punishment. After all, could there be any figure more powerful in meting out harm or salvation contemporarily than a cop? In rendering the merciful cop, ruthless Christ or Jesus as ‘super-cop’, the sculpture uses kitsch and debasement as strategies to draw into question excessive vigilance, strict rule-following or obedience, and moral judgments.
