Sam St Jon x Asking For It (2020)

Description

Sam St Jon is an award-winning photographer from Wollongong, NSW, who uses photography to create lucsious, affective and often funny pictures that reference religious and renaissance paintings.

Every woman who has ever gripped her keys in fear and readiness in a carpark after dark will relate to the comic turn of this image, in which two women hold a mountain of a man down on the hood of a car, and menace him with their keys. The title, of course, refers to the fact that victims have so often been told that they ‘asked for it’ in relation to assault, harassment, stalking and other forms of sexist or abusive behaviour. 

But this incredible photograph is also a contemporary restaging of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ (1620–1621), in which the Israelite heroine Judith saves her city and her people by beheading the Assyrian General Holofernes, who has fallen into a drunken, lustful sleep. Artemisia Gentileschi herself was raped by a trusted mentor at seventeen years of age, and the painting is often interpreted as a form of visual revenge, with Judith assumed to be a self-portrait by Gentileschi. St Jon’s Judith is resolved, powerful and fierce, and the image is full of dark humour. It also evokes the original in its use of chiaroscuro, colour and pose.

The image measures 50 x 70 cm, is printed on museum-quality paper and is professionally framed in a stunning decorative gold frame. The size and fragility of these pieces means that the buyer will need to collect them (contactless) from our Gymea shopfront. Please contact us for more information.