Via Dolorosa
Between 2005-2009 Howard worked on her first commission, titled "Repetition is Truth - Via Dolorosa". Via Dolorosa, Latin for ‘Way of Suffering’, is the name of a street within the Old City of Jerusalem, believed to be the path that Jesus walked, bearing the cross, towards his crucifixion. It is also another name for the fourteen Stations of the Cross, which depict these final hours of his life – The Passion.
While Howard’s fourteen paintings reference The Passion, the creation of the series was in fact provoked by one of the most shocking photographs to emerge from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Detainees routinely endured torture and humiliation at the hands of American military personnel, as exposed through the media. The particular image was of a prisoner standing on a box, hooded and wired with electrodes; thus the box becomes the modern day equivalent of the Cross – a tool of humiliation and torment. Thus, the paintings offer a broader commentary on the universality of human rights abuses and people’s capability for cruelty towards each other. A publication accompanies the work with texts by art historian and curator Joachim Pissarro and Shami Chakrabarti.
Joachim Pissarro has described the series as “sublime”, in accordance with Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement:
“The sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence, provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality."It is this idea of limitlessness that Howard seeks to engage with, the belief that human suffering is never-ending, hence the name of the work – Repetition is Truth.
“One enters a room with fourteen Stations of the Cross by Rachel Howard – her Via Dolorosa. Monumental, quiet, graceful, discrete, luscious, restrained and yet, at the same time, forceful, masterful, deafening – these paintings yield more layers of emotions than one can absorb all at once."Read more about this topic: Rachel Howard