Green and Purple, Good and Evil Anonymous

I fill my search history with mug shots and tear up a nice school shirt as an incoherent combination of thoughts, memories and questions swirls in my head. As always, when confused, I turn to my oils and brushes.

In 2008, I watched Professor Zimbardo’s TED talk about the malleability of the line between good and evil. As I learned about Abu Ghraib, and Stanley Milgram, and Zimbardo’s own infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, I began to question what that line truly was. Since we all seem simultaneously capable of good and evil, what does it mean when the balance tips in the wrong direction?

On the palette to my left, I experiment with greens and purples. I distort the distinctly uneven left corner of my mouth, peeking just above the tape in the photograph. As I do this, Myuran’s expressionist paintings resurface in my mind. When they appeared with the headline “from his final hours” after the tragedy of Bali Nine, I understood the subjects’ expressions a bit more, the firing squad reflected from their eyes. I paint the blacks of my eyes with a little red, humanizing the articles I had read with each stroke.

Slowly, the hues of my face morph into each other, creating an ash grey from the distance. Once, I had been so disgusted...