Injustice

25.83 x 36.54 inches

Digital art, Adobe Fresco

Background:

A commissioned piece requested by my former professor of Philosophy. She approached me to do an art piece that would be complementary and supplementary to her dissertation on epistemic injustice. This was also the first painting I did since starting out with digital art.

Description:

The artwork was inspired by a scene from Maleficent, where she wakes up the next morning to find that her lover had cut off her wings. Wings have become synonymous to the idea of freedom and independence, and to associate this with women, it makes the scene all the more powerful. This was because it struck as a strong metaphor for rape, abuse, and its long-term effects on a person. There is no turning back as a victim of rape and abuse, but healing and empowerment is possible, hence the use of plants and flowers for wings; symbolic of the process of healing and regrowth.

However, there is another depth to the plants and flowers depicted. The flora you see are both native and invasive in the Philippines. The invasive species have mostly been introduced to the country by man for economic purposes. But these alien plants have become disruptive to the Philippine biodiversity because they are able to flourish in any setting and context, and grow in overwhelming patches to the point of choking out the native plants in the area.

One such flora is the Mahogany tree. It is considered invasive because its seeds and saplings are easily transmitted from place to place, and grows easily to wherever they land. They steal the nutrients from other plants and grow to become big and intrusive. In the artwork, you can see that the roots of the Mahogany tree has burrowed deep into the skin of our subject, causing irritation and bleeding.

These two ideas have been combined to visually depict epistemic injustice, wherein--to simplify the concept--countries like the Philippines have been colonized and have been made to conform to a certain way of thinking (that of a Western-centric system), without realizing that we have become wary and suspect of our own systems of knowledge.