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This photo is one in a series I've been shooting of kitsch Buddha/Bodhisattva statues draped in yellow condoms. I was once told I would never understand Buddhism because I'm not "Asian;" and yet, I was speaking to a Canadian Buddhologist at the time. So I began to think about how we put borders up around cultures, or aspects of cultures. Whether this is to protect them from our influence or to protect us from theirs doesn't really matter. In the end, cultures that are sealed off from adaptation, interaction, and reinterpretation will eventually suffocate anyhow.

So this series uses the visual ingredients of the statue and the condom as metaphors for cultural tropes in the post-secular West, in a period of globalism.

A statue is a static, frozen, unchanging human figure; as a kitsch ornament, it exists as a cheap way of bestowing some measure of cultural identification. The condom is a synthetic barrier that prevents organisms from moving through it--blocked from procreation, they will eventually die. Although globalization is a contemporary topic, we are also in a period of building walls. These walls can be literal and physical (such as that proposed to keep Mexicans Mexican and Americans American) but more often are social, rhetorical, or cultural.