| Virgin of the Dirt opens the New Morality series with quiet intensity and layered ambiguity. Based on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’
The Virgin Worshipping the Host (1854), the work echoes the pose and devotional stillness of the original: hands clasped, body centered, gaze withheld. But the materials and markings reframe everything.
Painted on mounted denim—a substrate of labor, rebellion, and cultural grit—the figure is grounded in the profane. Her hands and face are revised with tribal warpaint: not decorative, but declarative. The markings evoke ritual, resistance, and identity. They suggest that sanctity is not inherited—it’s enacted. The warpaint destabilizes the Virgin’s passivity, transforming her into a hybrid icon of spiritual agency and cultural defiance.
The background fades into darkness, with a red gradient bleeding in from the left—a chromatic echo of sacrifice, passion, or quiet violence. Threads hang from the bottom edge, raw and unresolved, like emotional residue or symbolic unraveling.
This is a study of sanctity reframed. Virgin of the Dirt observes how religious iconography persists even when belief shifts—how symbols of purity and grace can be recontextualized through material, gesture, and emotional ambiguity. It’s not a critique. It’s a reading. A quiet invocation of the sacred, stitched into the fabric of the profane.
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