The Hand That Feeds You
By West Williams
Artist’s Statement: The Hand That Feeds You
I spent my early childhood in rural Louisiana, deep in the American South. Through years of family visits back, I've witnessed Christian influence grow in the lives of many I know. The responses to the growing power of Christianity are varied. I’ve know people to use Christianity as a weapon against other groups of people, as a tool to hold themselves accountable, or as an explanation for things that some people wouldn’t even give a second thought to. My piece depicts this wild landscape of beliefs, as well as what it may look like to an outsider, which is my experience as someone who has never had much reason to believe in any of it.
From where I currently stand, many of these Christian beliefs can appear absurd, but I don't mean that dismissively. I think absurdity has always been part of sacred literature; the Bible included. And yet oftentimes, some people—such as many in my home town Houma—take scripture as literal truth. I wanted to reflect the absurdity of this by quite literally staging human reactions to an overwhelming, larger-than-life presence.
The work was created with Photoshop and a DSLR camera, I took about 20 pictures of myself in varying poses and expressions, and of course, a photo of my hand. Once I cut the backgrounds out of my images, I played with filters and effects in Photoshop, and placed myself in different locations on a surreal hillscape background that I had drawn, blurred, and pixelated. Then, I overlaid a final color filter to give everything a more blueish hue and the posterize effect to give that almost low-poly look.
West is a 16 year old digital artist in Santa Fe, New Mexico that works with programs like Photoshop and Blender. A lot of his work is based around self-expression, featuring himself as a subject, but he also creates fictional work commenting on real world issues and happenings.
