monster-making

Friends have commented on the element of the creepy, or ugly, in this piece - something I tend to skirt in my aesthetics. But sometimes - ehem - the truth isn't pretty. 

This is about the making of ugly, about the mounting of monsters;  and about their final fate: the erasure of the monster.  It's a meditation on the designing of narratives necessary to the paring away of someone's humanity; on the background consensus and constructs needed to revoke another's selfhood and place within kin and community.  For how else can the unkind, the cruel, and even the unscrupulous, be perpetrated?  Take away context, and place, and person, and what's left is the object, where in the space of all that's removed there remains, purportedly, objectivity, the slippery illusion at the crux of any monster-making story for those making it.
 
It's an odd experience to be on the inside of this dynamic and to be aware of it, from its inception to its conclusion, at once subject and witness.  But it's a perspective that remains on the outside - which is the point of the monster enterprise from the outset; be it about me, or whoever is next.