In a later piece called Phoenix Rising the color gold is painted upright behind the portrait of the artist. In Me Too Jasper the gold is painted as a slab like table which denotes sacrifice. The symbology of a dominating sacrificial table is two-fold: the first, representing the sacrifice of the feminine; and the second, a more personal experience of an encounter at 19 years old with a psychic reader in the Black Forest in Germany. The reader in a trance told me that in a past life I had been a 15 year old girl who has been raped and slaughtered on a sacrificial table as part of a ritual to some gods in Scandanavia thousands of years before. I use Jasper Johns' motive of drawing faceless human figures into his work to single out the form of a faceless woman standing errect in front not prostrate on the gold table slab.
I chose a large canvas for the work because it was important to me the female figure be of a more realistic scale. I used my own form as the template outline, admitting this was also a personal self-portrait, as well as representative of the female figure in general. There is a girl-like quality versus woman form as well that was important to capture, and the innocense underneath. My goal was to give the viewer the opportunity to see themseveles in the painting. The fact that the world's average height of a woman is 5 feet two inches tall lent my form to serve as the subject representing not just me but women in general. That's why it was important to paint this at this scale. This painting is of the average woman after thousands of years of an oppressive legacy, invisible outside of how the patriarch have depicted her. Her standing at the table is to capture the current moment in time, the moment where she realizes she had a choice to submit to the status quo and get on the table yet again to be sacrificed or instead find her "no" and while still pensively tentative realizing she can no longer submit herself to be sacrificed.
The backdrop shows the Frank Gehry designed Concert Hall in downtown LA which sits kitty corner beside the Broad contemporary museum. There are green stripes leading up into the background under the slab gold table which are the same stripes that are painted on the street directly in front of the Broad which people walk across at the traffic light before entering the museum. The female form stands with her hands behind her back waiting. She is still somehow bound and annoymous standing upright and still outside the Broad looking in. Her legs look weak, wobbly, unsure as she takes a stand. There is a frayed, split pink ribbon wrapped across the scene in the painting which holds a distracting disruptive tension which I also deliberately seek to convey to highlight a different kind of ceremony is about to take place with the anticipation the long over due ribbon frayed with time will be cut and something new can now emerge.
The awkward angle of the ribbons are drawn also as another tribute to Jasper John's use of frames that often hang deliberately off and out from the painting. I admire Jasper's work in that he was attempting in the same way to break down the "frameworks" we work in and to redefine the boundaries of conventional mindsets around art.
I deliberately paint the figure's stockings red as a self-deprecating nod to the German writer Thomas Mann's character, Der Kleine Herr Friedamann (the little Mr. Friedemann) who, resolved his love will go unrequited, devotes himself secretly to a love of the arts, and sits reservedly on the sidelines appearing very conventional except for his bright red socks.