Great Minds Think Alike

This piece was the subject I chose for my Medical Ethics project, my subject was the Nazi experiments performed by Eduard Wirths in Auschwitz, as well as many other concentration camps by other Nazi doctors. The experiments were horrific in nature, such as having a young boy strapped to a chair while a heavy hammer would periodically strike him, to simulate head trauma. Or experiments in which subjects were frozen to test the human body against hypothermia and frostbite. And experiments with chemicals and diseases such as mustard gas an Malaria.

The experiment that I chose as a focus for my piece is the Twin experiments. These were gruesome operations performed on identical twins, in which the Nazi doctors would forcibly sew them together, thus creating a man-made conjoined twin, These surgeries were often performed under no anesthesia, and with crude or unsanitary tools, leading to infection and other causes of death in these 'conjoined twins'.

For this piece I chose two 12x12 canvases, and attached them together using wood glue, the askew nature of this diptych is intentional to convey a disjointed chaos. After the canvases were attached, I printed the mirrored faces onto a red cloth using a mirroring program on my iPad, after they were printed I cut them apart, and sewed them back together, the stitching is meant to look shoddy, like it was hastily done but untrained hands. after the canvas was painted to the color I liked, I used clear gesso to stick the cloth pieces on the canvas, also askew, the tilted and disjointed look of the canvas and cloth was meant to appear unstable, and I think I portrayed it well. After the cloth was attached I painted over the edges to give it a dingy look, and painted over the stitching to give it the appearance of a badly festering suture. I believe I pulled off the effects in this piece well, and the overall feeling of dread and illness it has works for the subject.