Karen L. Kirshner

Asylum Seekers

2019, acrylic on canvas 30″(H) x 30″(W)

I painted Asylum Seekers, without any preconception. I had; painted a canvas black and began painting whatever would emerge from within. I had been stirred up by news on TV and that I read about the brutal, inhumane treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers at the Mexican border by the Trump Administration. The pent-up angst I felt for the persecuted came through in my expression on the canvas. Of course, I created the painting consciously, My process is being in the moment of creation. It is in the “now.”. I am an intuitive creative, internalizing integration of experience and observations and emotional responses to what is in my environment. And then, I project it onto the canvas, never knowing what I am going to create in advance. Asylum Seekers conveys the message that the immigrant is persecuted, like a Christ-figure or in effigy as the symbol and locked in with nowhere to go, there is the machinery of the administration’s systemic abuses working—it’s as a concentration camp or factory, there is an assembly line of neglect, torture, family separation and death. A child remains as a witness to a parent dying and already dead. Alone the child sits.

Video Short by Karen L. Kirshner

NYSWA:  Karen L. Kirshner