For this re/composition I chose to focus on some of the harms that can be done and were done to me by the evangelical doctrines and scriptures that I grew up with. There were scriptures that we needed to memorize in AWANA (Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed), and this progression of scriptures is commonly called the Romans Road to Salvation in the evangelical subculture in which I grew up. Though the message of these scriptures is meant to be hopeful overall, and it's meant to be saving someone's life, someone's eternal soul, a person must be convinced that they are in need of saving first. In order to do that there was a heavy focus on scriptures that communicated to us as children that we were sinful, that the normal-seeming bad things that we did like disobeying our parents were, in fact, because we were sinful by nature. We were deserving of death and did not meet God's standard of perfection. One of the passages goes on to say that everyone is worthless.
It seems like many people who memorized the same scriptures and existed in the same evangelical circles I did did not internalize this sense of worthlessness as much as I did. I don't really know if that's true. I have no way of knowing what other people internalize. All I know is that this way of framing, humanity and individuals was extremely harmful to my sense of self-worth, which is a pretty important thing for a kid. Instead of being told constantly that I was totally sinful and deserved death, I should've been told that I was a kid and that I just needed to learn how to be a person, and that takes time, and that's fine. I should've been told that I deserved to live - not that I deserved to die.
Process:
As I went through the process this week I looked at old artwork and things that I had written, I looked at images from magazines and various catalogs. I tried to pick up things that communicated what I was trying to get across here. It's a little bit difficult to know what sort of images I am looking for until I find them, but some of the items that I found started to create a picture and a story that was similar to at least the story that I had had in my mind when I started out this week.
I wanted to communicate the ominous sort of feeling that I thought the vulture captured. I think that frequently in evangelical circles people think that the Scriptures they use to try to lead people to salvation couldn't possibly have a harmful effect on people's well-being. I also assume that parents don't think that they are harming their children when they tell them messages that they are totally sinful and that they deserve to die. However, it is confusing for me that they don't anticipate that this might happen. I was trying to call attention to just that kind of negative feeling and the negative effects that these scriptures had on my sense of self. I was a very very obedient, non-defiant child who believed in Jesus and tried to do every single thing possible to honor God. I don't know why it was necessary to drive this point of unworthiness home to children.
I enjoyed picking up pieces from my past artwork. I feel like the collage is a more effective mode of communicating these sorts of things than many other modes.
I was struck this week when I was creating collages that the actual cutting process can be a big part of the rhetorical moves that are made - the actual physical by cutting off the paper - and I would like to play around with that a little bit. I found that some pictures I didn't really like the feeling of slicing into them with a knife. For example, when I cut out the picture of the little girl, I felt that cutting with scissors seemed less violent. I may need to work with that a little bit since using a knife and X-Acto knife or a hobby knife is a more precise way of cutting. For now I think I'd like to cut positive healing images with scissors and cut negative feeling images with the knife. I'm not sure if it will continue on though, and I might try some similar rhetorical analysis with gluing and fixing different combination methods as well as the cutting methods.
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