Men, women, and families dotting around the tobacco spotted streets, ninety-degree heat bouncing off shiny foreheads, eyes squinting into windows and walls, all of them doing their best to abstract meaning from colorful fish paintings and tall structures of naked people.
The “Medicine Woman” was found casually. Casually walking supple streets and peering into glossy walls, I stopped and peered at my reflection in a glass window. My eyes blurred from my own image and into the artwork of a woman’s head and shoulder. She is profiled on her right side, and her hair is crafted out of thick beady colored pills, spilling down the page. The “Medicine Woman’s” face, a pieced collage of translucent orange, was constructed from used medicine containers. Torn papers printed with drug prescriptions are piled around her head. Hand deployed close to her thick lip, she tempts herself with a pill, as if she desires to consume the drugs that deride down her throat and consume her. The artist, Anna Marie Parthun, created this piece with the intention of allowing viewers to see themselves within a puzzle of pills so they can identify their own addictions.
The “Medicine Woman’s” face is a bright orange abstraction used to represent her vitriolic addiction and destructed willfulness. Orange slices of fragmented plastic from chopped up medicine containers make up the woman’s face. Her orange spectrum of skin gives the effect that the cells of her body have consumed the host of the drugs, eating away at her human flesh. Her empty white eye is staring at the drug in her hand as her eye floods with lust. The poison in her eye bleeds into her skin and absorbs the excess waste of her desire. The “Medicine Woman” expresses no emotion. Listening closely, the viewer can imagine hearing her past voice speak scurrilous attacks on people taking drugs. Now she ostracizes herself because she has become a slave to the same master.
Beady pills create a thickness to the woman’s hair that contrast the soft, fragile, and fluid accord of an average woman. White and blue and yellow and tan pastel drugs are aligned in curvy weaves down the nape of her neck. Rigid and pale, the button-shaped execrable drugs flow down in lines. The composition’s implicit detail suggests that humans are made up of tiny pieces; they are the combination of their addictions. There is a pattern to the things that humans consume: the chemicals of our plight. Individually these chemicals are represented as little toxic pills. Although, when one looks at the whole masterpiece, one experiences the artificial tone that was produced. The viewer is vacuumed into the “Medicine Woman’s” mind. Her mind is cold, cold and empty, because the drugs have taken every drop of blood and beating intricacies that used to live within her mind.
The shapes of ripped paper pasted around the “Medicine Woman” evoke the sense that when the woman consumes her drugs, nothing else matters. The pieces of paper making up the background blur as they are piled one on top of the other. The viewer can tell that the woman desires to escape from reality, and he connects to her desire to escape. He then questions what situations in his life he wants to escape from; he considers what makes his own drugs viciously addicting. Humans are the composition of the addicting things they consume. The viewer marinates in the idea that his own drugs seek deceive and destroy him.
The artwork tells the story of a dangerously compliant woman, and how she became a replica of what her eyes consumed. This piece implies a dual meaning. The “Medicine Woman” could be either a doctor or a doctor that has become a patient. The “Medicine Woman” is complex, patterned, and regulatory, as seen with her intricate pieces of hair. Prescribing drugs to patients, as seen with the prescription papers around her, she feels the burden of her patient’s pain. Her world has become a list of dying people. Desiring to escape from her pain of prescriptions, she gives into her volition. She is more tractable than she used to be, because what she knows is working against her humanity. Her eyes can only see the orange tinted obstructed view of pills; she acquiesces to her drugs that have enslaved her.
