You Will Be With Me in Paradise
by Steisha Pintado
Exhibition: November 15-19, 2022
Reception: Friday, November 18th, 6pm - 8pm
You Will Be With Me in Paradise is a group of mixed media work that explores my experience of being born and raised in a fundamentalist religious cult, and the aftermath of leaving the cult.
As a Jehovah’s Witness, I was taught that Armageddon could come at any moment, and only the true worshippers of Jehovah would survive and receive everlasting life on a Paradise Earth. This Paradise was so vividly depicted in the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ literature that I never had to spend time imagining my own interpretation. The oppressive life as a Jehovah’s Witness always felt more real to me than their promise of Paradise.
The fabric in my work is a vessel of visual and tactile experience that directly relates to memories of my family and to the experience of being shunned. This choice of materials is in dialogue with the practice of arts and crafts that my mother maintained when I was a little girl, specifically the fabrics she used to sew my Kingdom Hall dresses and the fake flowers she used to make floral arrangements and bouquets. The installation You Will Be With Me in Paradise is my criticism of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ promise of Paradise, depicting it as a landscape of plastic plants and flowers and thereby subverting it into a space that I can accept on my own terms. A mirror mounted in this representation invites viewers to see themselves in this literal and figurative space.
Strictly following the Ten Commandments, the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not allow for any iconic imagery in their worship. In keeping with this convention, I utilize the accidental iconography of cookie-cutter Kingdom Hall spaces, such as their literature, carpets, chairs, wallpapers, platforms, podiums, microphones, preaching practices, double-speak, and Paradise Earth imagery.
This body of work is a longing for the childhood nostalgia of these spaces, and for the people I left behind in those spaces. While my work is a definite criticism of an oppressive religious cult, I do not seek to mock its belief system or the spaces in which its operates, but rather to provide my own sincere interpretation of each. I believe in the freedom of religion, but unlike the Jehovah's Witnesses, I also believe in the freedom to leave a religion without the fear of estrangement, harassment, and coercive control.
More About Steisha
I use my work to explore my personal experience of being born and raised in a fundamentalist religious cult, and the aftermath of leaving the cult. I was taught that Armageddon could come at any moment, and only the true worshippers of Jehovah would survive and receive everlasting life on a Paradise Earth. My purpose in life was predetermined and designed around being a Jehovah’s Witness. There was room for very little else. It was a life of isolation, guilt, and fear.
My practice is interdisciplinary, using drawing, painting, puppetry, and stop motion animation together to unfold a narrative of indoctrination and liberation. Cultic studies research has become the cornerstone of my practice, which feels quite necessary in the current political climate and state of insurgency in the United States. Although my experience and focus has religious roots, my research applies across the different practices of undue influence, indoctrination, radicalization, and extremism. There are many common threads woven through the tactics of extremist cults.
My work helps me to confront the fact that I am an apostate, take back my power and my voice, and speak out against a system of oppression hiding in plain sight. I make this work for myself, for others who have also had these experiences, and to create a public awareness around these issues. I use this work to celebrate how I have forcefully taken the things that I had been denied since birth: an education, a career, a voice, a free life where two plus two always equals four.
Learn more about Steisha and her work at www.steishapintado.com or follow her @steishapintado
