Religious Masturbation
(Does NOT mock Christianity or religion, but certain unwanted byproducts of it)
This work operates on two simultaneous readings, neither canceling the other.
The first is a critique of performative faith — the modern reduction of religion to self-validation, aesthetic identity, and social currency. The flagellants of medieval Christianity beat themselves bloody as an act of genuine devotion, accepting physical suffering as the price of spiritual purification. The figure here substitutes that pain for pleasure, that sacrifice for spectacle. She doesn't kneel before God. She kneels before a camera. The capirote (the hat) — historically a symbol of penitence and shame — is rendered in metal and thorns, beautiful and unwearable, religion as ornament rather than burden. The cross is present but repurposed. Devotion has become content.
The second reading implicates the pornography industry's compulsive consumption of innocence and purity. When every other frontier has been exhausted, the sacred becomes the final territory to colonize. The figure is not desecrating religion — she is being consumed by an industry that has already desecrated everything else, now reaching toward the divine as the last remaining symbol of the untouched. Her purity is not hers. It is a product.
It also highlights the fragility of the symbolism we idolize. For most the cross is a symbol for Christ's sacrifice, for the elites it's a tool for media manipulation and for a very very small few it can even be a lewd toy.
What unites both readings is the camera. She is watched, or watching herself being watched. The act of documentation transforms devotion into performance and performance into commodity. The only difference between the two interpretations is who is holding the camera — her, or someone else.