Station IX: Jesus Falls the Third Time

Lestor Doré

As an ex-Catholic, a practicing Quaker, and a follower of Jesus the social revolutionary, the Stations of the Cross as inspiration for the secret torture carried out in the so-called “War on Terror” came naturally to me. I don’t like to explain everything in my pictures: I think it drains the piece of the possibility of it resonating with each viewer, allowing the form and content to be interpreted individually. Sometimes I don’t even know until later what some parts of a work mean. But this particular piece is a conflation of incidents and influences and opinions reflecting my views and beliefs about the culpability and inspiration for what took place in Abu Ghraib, the Gitmo detention camp, the prison at Bagram Air Base, and secret detention facilities around the world set up by the Bush administration — and still being used by the Obama administration, as far as I know — to use extraordinary and illegal methods of interrogation of those detained. I hope by creating this piece to keep from internalizing my feelings about what I have learned and to make some small attempt to shock Americans out of their complacency, isolation, and rationalization about how the US government uses our tax dollars.

wanderoo.net

Doré is a Madison artist whose career in political art began in 1967 with the Chicago Seed, an antiwar “underground” newspaper. Lester earned an MFA from the UW-Madison in 1991, worked as a graphic designer for the UW-Madison School of Nursing, and retired from wage slavery in 2006. He has since devoted much of his time to creating political art for display and activism, filling his sketchbooks, and printmaking. His series of peace hero posters have been seen in numerous marches and demonstrations, and were displayed at the Heartland Cafe and Gallery in Chicago, the 2007 FGC Gathering, and the Alaska Peace Center in Fairbanks. He has worked with the Oaxacan revolutionary art collective ASARO, and curated a show of their work, ¡Oaxaca Resiste!, in 2008. Lester is a founding member of Art Surge, the Madison-based political art collective which has mounted shows in Madison and Chicago.