Vanessa Lorraine Phillips

Biography

Vanessa Lorraine Phillips is a photo-based artist currently working in Toronto.                      She received her BFA in Photography from Ryerson University in 2011. Her work         focuses on the implications of religion in contemporary society. Vanessa has published      her work in Portfolio Eleven and exhibited within Toronto.

Artist’s Statement

Lessons From Sunday School

I have always been very taken with the aesthetic of religion, and if I think back that’s really where it all began for me. Churches were old and full of antique furniture, dust, and archaic books. I still can’t believe the beauty that can be found within a cathedral. To this day I keep going back to them, unable to resist.

I was an inquisitive child and my faith was on thin ice to begin with. I had issues with my lessons from Sunday school. My teacher told us stories about a vengeful god who drowned an entire world, save for a handful of people and a boatload of animals. I remember I asked why God would murder almost everyone in the world. I was told he did it out of love, and of course to punish the wicked. Ironically my lessons at public school complimented my lessons at Sunday school. We were usually learning about historical figures that wanted to cleanse the earth of a particular kind of person. It's interesting now to think about children learning stories where relationships are based on abuse and skewed power dynamics. It's okay to use violence with discretion in order to teach a lesson to someone you love.

During the summers I spent my time at a Born Again Christian summer camp that my grandparents accidentally sent me to (I would eventually work there). This is a place where hundreds of children accept God into their lives every single summer. I can say with certainty that this is where religion was securely cemented into my train of thought.

As I grew older I began to struggle even more with my faith, issues that seemed fundamentally wrong seemed to be surfacing. I was tired of having to feel guilty about every natural impulse I had, and I was certainly done apologizing for it. It’s funny to me now but the thing I remember most about that time was the overwhelming sense of embarrassment I felt. I’d come to the realization that I'd been making excuses for my religion to those around me and to myself.

I feel like one day I woke up in the trap that I consider religion to be. For instance, Christianity doesn’t originate ideas about female subordination and male authority, but it does justify them; it makes them ‘sacred’ and a matter of outrage if anyone confronts them.

There are no convincing reasons left in the world to treat specific groups of people as inferior. It used to be possible -just barely- to think that some groups of people were different in some way profound enough to justify inequality. Without Religion, a defense of unequal rights just looks like what it is- a defense of injustice. Religion is calling sacred what would otherwise be viewed as prejudice, hatred and exploitation, making it seem vaguely respectable behind a thin veneer of tradition.

These images are a series of questions that I have never fully resolved; they are an exploration of all the issues about my religion I’d decidedly ignored in the past. The project is obviously personal but I think the ultimate goal in creating this work is to make people question what they see and hear. Why is honor found between the legs of women? Why are ideas of female and male sexuality strictly delegated to us? Why are some groups of people declared worse than others? Why does gender equality still require a stretch of the imagination?

Links

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