Rachel Howard - Repetition Is Truth - Via Dolorosa

Religion, repetition, mortality and violence -- particularly controlled violence -- are enduring themes in Howard's work. These fourteen, large-scale paintings are accompanied by a small 2005 study of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, the Iraqi detainee who was photographed being subjected to torture at the hands of American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. When these now-infamous images of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi -- hooded and standing on a box in a cruciform position -- were released in 2004, Howard took particular note of the box. She explains: "The box is almost like a plinth -- I was thinking about the cross, the Crucifixion, and how it related to this box as a twenty-first century place of horror, humiliation and human rights atrocities, and I couldn't help but connect the two." As one moves between the Stations, the box variously emerges, or appears almost submerged in the paint, before eventually vanishing.