A person with face painted to resemble cracked, gold-colored, volcanic lava, holding their hands together near their mouth. They are wearing a dark hooded cloak. Floating above are jewelry and a rainbow crystal, and in the background, the moon is visible through cloud cover. Gold coins labeled 'We are all prostitutes' are at the bottom of the image.

ALL FOR SILVER — Virgin Mary

RELIGIOUS ICON | SYMBOLIC FIGURE

ALL FOR SILVER strips Mary of iconography's usual reverence. Her face, rendered in cracked gold leaf veined with red, reads less as a halo than as a wound — sanctity worn down to its material substrate. Beneath the crossed hands and the ornate pendant suspended like a relic above her head, her body becomes the body of an instrument: an oud, hollowed at its center, gold filigree standing in for a voice never asked to speak on its own terms. At its base, a small coin bears the collage's only text — "we are all prostitutes" — collapsing the distance between the mother of God and the woman whose worth has always been priced by someone else. The title completes the transaction: thirty pieces of silver bought a betrayal in the gospel account; here the same currency buys two thousand years of a story told about her, not by her. Devotion and commerce share a ledger. Mother Mary is not the most represented woman in Western art by accident.