Deposition 2 - Virginia Cohn Parkum, c. 2021

Created for the 2021 exhibition “De-Colonizing Christ” at St. Stephen’s Riverfront Gallery, Deposition 2 occupies a singular and deeply consequential place within Virginia Cohn Parkum’s body of work. As the most recent painting that can be firmly dated and the largest composition she ever completed, the piece carries the gravity of culmination. It does not feel like a continuation so much as a gathering — an act of drawing together decades of spiritual inquiry, political conscience, and personal reckoning into one final, deliberate statement.

The title invokes the Deposition: the moment Christ’s body is taken down from the cross. Historically, this scene has been rendered as spectacle, grief, or divine pathos. Parkum approaches it differently. Rather than presenting a literal biblical tableau, she distills the moment into a choreography of weight, support, and care. The composition emphasizes the act of lowering — the human labor of care — over the drama of martyrdom. Arms, structural lines, or abstracted forms seem to brace and receive, suggesting not a single narrative event but a universal gesture: the responsibility of the living to hold the dead, the burden of compassion, and the quiet dignity of tending to loss.

This shift from spectacle to tenderness aligns with the exhibition’s mission to re-examine inherited Christian imagery through a decolonizing lens. Parkum removes triumphalism and replaces it with vulnerability. The sacred does not reside in divine authority or redemptive suffering imposed from above, but in human proximity in the act of bearing one another through grief. In this way, Deposition 2 reframes religious iconography as an ethic of care rather than an instrument of power.

The painting’s physical presence reinforces this interpretation. Its scale invites bodily encounter; the viewer does not simply observe the scene but stands within its gravity. Parkum’s surface alternates between density and dissolution: passages of heavy pigment evoke corporeal weight and earthly matter, while softened edges and luminous openings suggest transition rather than transcendence. The color palette — grounded earth tones punctuated by muted reds and restrained light recalls flesh, soil, and the threshold between life and decay. Rather than dramatizing death, the work situates mortality within the continuum of material existence.

Within the arc of Parkum’s career, Deposition 2 resonates as a profound bookend to her lifelong engagement with spirituality, mortality, and liberation. Earlier works wrestled with suffering, state violence, ritual symbolism, Buddhist compassion, and the search for inner freedom. In this painting, those themes converge into a distilled meditation on release: not escape from suffering, but acceptance of its reality and the ethical responsibility it places upon the living.

Viewed in the context of her life, the work takes on additional poignancy. Created shortly before her cancer diagnosis, Deposition 2 can be understood as an artist standing at the threshold — not in foreknowledge, but in intuitive awareness of impermanence. Parkum had long grappled with death as both existential reality and spiritual passage; here, the subject is no longer distant or symbolic. The painting’s quiet gravity suggests an artist contemplating the human condition with unusual clarity, distilling what mattered most: compassion, release, and the shared burden of mortality.

Her decision to contribute to De-Colonizing Christ at this stage in her life underscores a sense of artistic necessity. This was not merely another exhibition; it was an opportunity to participate in an evolving dialogue about faith, power, suffering, and redemption — themes that had threaded through her work for decades. In offering Deposition 2, Parkum did not present a doctrinal answer but a human response: the sacred is revealed not in conquest, nor even in sacrifice, but in the act of holding one another at the edge of loss.

As her largest and final dated work, the painting reads as a quiet magnum opus. It is not triumphant, but resolute. It gathers her explorations of religion, spirituality, and death into a final gesture of empathy. It replaces spectacle with tenderness, martyrdom with care, and transcendence with presence. In doing so, Deposition 2 stands as a farewell not in despair, but in understanding — a final offering from an artist who spent her life seeking meaning in suffering and found it in compassion.