14 (In Memory Of tanaya Otterpohl)
14 (In Memory of tanaya Otterpohl) 2018 | gouache on paper | 30" x 14"
April 12, 2018
In 1986 when I was a freshman in high school, a man named Robert Clifton Mays broke into the home of one of my classmates, Tanaya Otterpohl, and murdered her. Like me, she was 14 years old. She suffered 14 violent wounds: stabbed 13 times then a 14th final cut to her throat. Her murderer served 14 years of a 35 year sentence for this crime. He’d already served for breaking into another woman’s home and attempting sexual assault. He would serve again for possession of an illegal firearm (sawed off shotgun) while on probation. He is still in prison for the last offense, for now.
Take from that all that it entails about violence against women, the failures of our criminal justice system, the trauma such an act inflicts on everyone who knew her and the broader community beyond. But take from it how precious her life was more than any of those things and how each single moment in her fourteen years was uniquely her own. She’s been on my mind a lot lately. This painting began with written words years ago, but I could never bring it to a close, and the mental representations of the number 14 kept coming back to me. I needed to get this one out, finally, and I wanted to elevate her from a nameless statistic.
I used iconography here to intentionally avoid any sort of exploitation, but the depiction is anything but emotionally detached. There is a violence to the marks, and the apparent balance between the three representations of the number 14 are in contrast to the actual inequity of what happened.
. . .
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