Ineke Knudsen

New Revelations

This project imagines a not-so-distant American future where Christians and conservatives have triggered the Apocalypse. In my paintings of the Apocalypse, all the desires of conservative Christians have come to pass: the eradication of people of color and queer folks, a revitalization of the American frontier and wilderness, and the return of Jesus Christ in the form of the Rapture. I’m specifically painting White conservative Christian girls, and I’m interested in their unique intersectionality of being a White conservative (an identity rife with racist social implications), being female (an identity deeply abused within the Christian subculture), and being a child (an identity subject to dramatic ideological change over time). In my paintings, these girls are removed from their churches and homes and moored, alone, in unpopulated American landscapes. Somehow, despite their religious and political devotion, the young women have been left behind, boxed out of the conservative utopia they helped create, and relegated to wandering empty landscapes, searching for their promised land that will never come to fruition. To help navigate this convoluted subject matter, I lean on the scholarship of historians Heather Cox Richardson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Kristin Kobes du Mez, in order to digest conservative and Christian ideologies through an American history reconceptualized via feminist, queer, and race theory. With this work, I aim not to decontextualize or neutralize conservative Christian politics and beliefs; I instead aim to enmesh myself within their specific, often dangerous, contexts, locating a horror and a hope within it.