Kimberly Wilder: An Assessment Part 2

However, half its length hangs from its perch, coiling around the woman's throat and choking her. Instead of a serpent's head, the snake has the head of a penis. At the same time, from the grass at her feet, a second snake, wound around her right calf and thigh, penetrates her cunt. Simultaneously, a third snake, rising from the thick grass, impales her anus.

Is the identification of the young nude with Eve too straightforward? What is the viewer to make of the absence of Adam; of the presence of not one, but three, snakes; of the serpents' choking of, and sexual assaults upon, the lone and defenseless woman; of the tree (is it the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or only a tree?); of the strange whirlwind-like cloud coming toward the woman from the picture's distance (is this God, a tornado, or just an odd confusion of the air, a mirage of sorts)? If the allusion to Genesis' account of the temptation and sin of Eve is intended, Kimberly certainly opens the traditional understanding of this critical moment in Christian faith and, indeed, Western culture, to new interpretations, understandings, and visions--an amazing feat for any artist and for any painting.

In a fourth picture, a platinum blonde, naked but for her red high heels, stands at the edge of a pit from which an intense, shimmering yellow-and-orange glow arises, suggesting that a fire rages therein. The hook on a large pulley tugs the chain about her neck, causing her to stand on tiptoe inside her heels, and a second hook, attached on a chain suspended from the same hook that lifts the chain around the victim's neck, impales the captive's anus, significantly adding to the likelihood of her injury or death should the pulley raise the hook: she will die, it appears, either of strangulation, of severe injury to her rectum and anus, or by being lowered to her fiery death inside the burning pit.

Meanwhile, to ensure that she suffers while she is still alive, wires have been attached to her nipples and the chain that hangs from the pulley has been wrapped around her semi-erect penis, which has been drawn between her parted thighs, and secured there by small weights.