Unfortunate Guest

Year | 2024

Medium | Mixed-Media Relief (Resin, Acrylic Paint, Oil Clay, Printed Images)

Size | 1.57 L x 18.0 W x 24.0 H in

Additional Details | At first glance, “Unfortunate Guest” shows a cheerful family feast. It’s only after looking carefully that the clear-resin silhouette at the table register: a child. The “invisible” guest stands in for UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger, a crisis most of us know in the abstract, while our own plates stay full. I used resin's transparency not as a trick but as a measure of distance: When suffering is far away, it reads as background. The table is decorated with printed images of food. Its excess isn’t about cartoon greed; it’s about priority and numbness, how celebration, gratitude, and “abundance” can edit out what we’d rather not name. The resin child is there the whole time; whether we see them is the point of the artwork.

(Image Credit: Adobe Stock #574368196)