Gary Irving
The Deadly Sins are, by their nature, perceived as unforgivable. The Catholic church refers to these as the Capital Sins, or Cardinal Sins. “Cardinal” originates from the latin word “hinge,” as in all other sins swing on the hinges of these deadly sins. I wanted to use the relationship between human behavior and the shaming of religion to show that, even through a selfish attempt to control our eternal fate, it hasn’t stopped us from committing these sins against the Earth. Particularly now, with our current political establishment, we must fight to protect what’s important.
Although they are commonly known as the Seven Deadly Sins, originally there were eight. These eight included gluttony, prostitution/lust, greed, pride, sadness, wrath, boasting, and sloth. In 590 AD, Pope Gregory decided to eliminate vaingory. He then combined sadness with sloth, and added envy, resulting in the modern view of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Here, the original eight are exemplified to include the sin of vanity, but sadness has been replaced with envy. The idea is to connect as closely as possible the original sins with modern humanity and the ways in which we have committed these ultimately unforgivable crimes against Mother Nature. I hand made the frames that encompass each sin with the intention to epitomize the depth of darkness that our sinful actions have caused Mother Nature. Each sin is labeled with its original Latin term and has my own personal description of its individually specific significance relating to human destruction of the planet, open of course to viewer interpretation.
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