Viva la Revolucion!

I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Downtown San Diego, near the Gaslamp district.  I was already stoked because it was free, but I was pleasantly surprised by the exhibition.  I'll be honest.  Before taking this class, I kind of thought that art, specifically modern art, would be either boring or just have little to no impact on me.  This was probably because the extent of my experience with modern art was the idea that anyone can make something " great" as long as they call it "art".  But the exhibit this time shattered my stereotypical preconception of art.  "Viva La Revolucion" was an intense display of the agony of social and political injustices all over the world.  The main areas focused on were the Latin American countries.  There was one in particular that ensnared my attention.  It was by a man named Stephan Doitschinoff (aka "Calma").  He was the son of a preacher in Brazil.  He grew to rebel against all the cultural, political, but mainly the religious influences of his area.  There was heavy evangelical pressure where he lived.  He rejected all of this and embraced the punk and street art culture.  This particular piece was an interactive installation.  It looked like the inside of a church.  You could walk right up to the altar, and right in front of it is that cushion that you kneel on when you pray (hassock?).  Surrounding you on all sides are Bibles, open to pages with what looked like Latin writing on them, and marked with a red ribbon.  There was also similar writing on the front and back walls, where there were exquisitely detailed, yet almost depressing images painted with acrylic and spray paint.  Behind you, if you face the altar, there is a naked woman standing on a snake with a scroll in it's mouth.  One of her bony ankles has a cross painted on it, whereas the other has a hangman's noose and structure.  On her knees there are cartographer's compasses, and on her left forearm you see factories.  Her right bicep shows a cross atop a globe or perhaps an atom, and the cross is being blown off by what looks like lightning. Her other bicep features a grim reaper's scythe piercing through the head of a person kneeling with a Bible in hand.  There is a large Bible painted across her chest with a ram lying on top of it.   Her heart is in her throat, and there are red tears streaming from her eyes.  I am not quite worldly, or wise enough to recognize and interpret many of the symbolic pictorial references, but I did see a black swan on her exposed intestines.  If I understood that right, what I remember from a World History class is that in the 16th century, the English believed that swans could only be white, given that only white one's were native to the areas they had explored.  But when they explored Australia, they came across black swans, an impossibility to them.  Since this revelation, the "Black Swan Theory" has been used to explain singular events of extreme rarity that have an enormous cultural or religious impact, and can revolutionize the mindset of the whole world.  A Black Swan can change everything, from the understanding of historical events to aspects of our own personal lives. On the woman's womb there appears to be a church painted, which, along with the snake,  I believe symbolizes the focus of the piece.  I think this is a protest of the church.  I believe that Calma has witnessed horrible things about the Church that you would not believe for a second... because it's the Church!  I think Calma wants us to look into the dealings of the Church objectively, without the expectation that they are all only doing good.  If what we find shatters our expectations, it would indeed change everything about how we think and how we view history.  Viva La Revolucion!