“Contract”

“Contract”

Will sacrifice and labor ever grand inclusion?

Contract began with a conversation I had with a writer while discussing another one of my works, They Keep Coming. He asked me if we were under a contract. We spoke about how, although we are technically free to make our own choices, we remain bound to the systems around us. I carried that question with me and began thinking about my own culture and the immigrant experience, specifically the belief that hard work and obedience will eventually lead to inclusion and the promise of the American Dream.

The barbed wire and concrete became the central devices through which I explored that contradiction. The concrete is the physical foundation of the American workforce, the restaurants, warehouses, construction sites, and countless other places where immigrants and working people contribute their labor. He is not just being restrained by the system, he is holding onto it. The same system that confines him is the system he continues to reach toward, believing that participation, sacrifice, and labor might eventually grant him belonging.

Above him, the expansive white space becomes a blank promise, the space where the American Dream exists as an idea, full of possibility but never fully defined. He remains between that promise and the ground beneath him, caught between aspiration and restriction.

The composition was inspired in part by Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Agnus Dei” 1635-40, in which the bound lamb becomes a symbol of sacrifice and religious offering. In Contract, rather than being offered as a religious sacrifice, he offers himself to the system. His body, labor, and willingness to endure become the offering.

Contract asks whether participation in a system can ever guarantee belonging, and what happens when the promise itself becomes the thing we remain bound to.

‍ ‍‍ Dorian Sobalvarro