My first collage was inspired by Timothy Morton’s quote from his book Ecology Without Nature: “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.” The collage is located just on the creator’s hand in the moment of Eve’s creation in the first panel of Bosch’s painting. I drew my source material from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Toulouse-Lautrec’s In the Salon of the Rue des Moulins, Manet’s Olympia, and from the Bosch painting itself.
   As Morton argues, we glorify Nature in the same way men glorify the figure of Woman, in that we admire it as completely separate from us while both subjecting and harming it. The biblical first occurrence of this is represented in the original Bosch, as Adam stares at Eve with utter awe and lust; his eyes and flushed cheeks indicate amazement with and newfound sexual desire for Eve’s figure. The aim of my collage is to combine fragments of feminine nudity and sexuality into a pedestal for the figure of Woman that Morton wrote of.  The bust of the woman belongs to Venus in the Botticelli painting; the owl and hand raised in blessing belong to the creator in the Bosch. The bust of Venus – the goddess of love and lust – wears the face of the owl that resides on the fountain resembling a tree bearing fruit just above, representing the impending indulgence in sin and man’s subsequent fall from grace. God’s hand raised in blessing above the pedestal and its contents, in conjunction with God’s knowing eye contact in the painting with the viewer, indicate the inevitability of Adam’s sadistic admiration of Eve and of man’s sadistic admiration of woman.
Prostitution, although people attempt to veil it as pro-woman and feminist, is the ultimate act of subordinating women to male power and desire. The boot that acts as the pedestal belongs to a prostitute in the Toulouse-Lautrec, while the reaching hand and eyes belong to a prostitute in the Manet. Olympia’s – the prostitute’s – hand originally covered her vulva, denying the viewer unpaid access to her body, while her eyes confront the viewer, who seems to take the role of her next client. The appearance of the owl, the eyes of the prostitute, and the religious sanctioning of the moment signify the beginning of an eternity of subordination without accountability.