JFK

Somewhere in an archive, a clerk filled out a body description form — height, weight, scars, distinguishing marks — reducing a human life to data points. Kathryn Cirincione found that form, or one like it, and pressed it into warm wax on wood, surrounding it with the ghostly outlines of bodies mapped and measured, front and back, as if preparing for war or accounting for its aftermath. The words float at the center like a verdict: 'Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.' Growing up in a Southern Italian family of church muralists and stained glass artists, Cirincione inherited the sacred responsibility of image-making. Her years in Medellín, Verona, and coastal California have only deepened that responsibility. Here, she uses the encaustic tradition — wax and fire, ancient as Fayum portrait paintings — to enshrine what bureaucracy tries to erase: the body, the name, the wound. The red marks that streak across dark bands of wax are not decorative; they insist. This is a piece born from the daily ritual of absorbing the news and carrying it into the studio. It asks the viewer to sit with the weight of documentation, to feel the distance between a form and a life, and to reckon with what is at stake when we stop asking questions.