“There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.” – Sophocles
Three years ago, I visited the Alexander Art Gallery for the first time. I had come to review Henk Pander’s The Ordeal, not knowing it would be his last solo exhibition before he died the next year. Paintings and drawings from across a lifetime depicted apocalyptic scenarios and narratives that referenced predominantly death and destruction. As I wrote at the time, “No matter how expertly painted, how creatively crafted, how defiantly clinging to beauty in all its visual instantiations, these paintings are about horror, that which is unleashed upon the world by evil forces, that which is experienced by the subjects of the painting, and that induced in us who view the cruelty on hand.”
The painter would have probably agreed that some of these sentiments apply to the work currently at the gallery. Sam Marroquin‘s exhibition When the World Looks Away is about the years of ongoing horror experienced by Palestinians in Gaza. The artist confronts us with depictions of humans under existential threat, their bodies and spirits under relentless assault, their culture and history intentionally eradicated, their grief more than a single generation can hold. As of this writing, there are now Israeli orders for even Doctors without Borders and other aid organizations to leave the strip by February, during ongoing mass displacement. This, and continued violence despite the cease fire agreements, will worsen the situation for the civilian population.
Alexander Art Gallery featuring Sam Marroquin
Henk would have been thrilled to see that there is a young artist at the beginning of her promising career taking up the mantle of bearing witness, and calling on us to do the same. This is pretty much where the comparison ends, though, given that he created huge oil paintings, and large pen-and-ink drawings thriving on the contrast between their size and the pristine executions of small strokes, thin lines and subtle markings. Marroquin’s, in contrast, are mixed media works, blind contour outlines drawn in charcoal, filled with acrylic paint, with added text for many of them.
I had seen a smaller subset of these intense paintings before, impressed by the use of her non-dominant hand to produce fluid impressions of scenes depicted on videos and print material of first hand experiences by Palestinians and other witnesses on site. At the time, the focus in conversations with the artist was on the selectivity of our media diets, connected to where we feel ideologically, or intellectually or “tribally” at home. Live witness accounts of the trauma are available, but never disseminated by most of the mass media, or are actively suppressed by factions on either side of the conflict. Marroquin felt compelled to step into the breach and expose us to the accounting, provide access to information that is not predetermined by the setting on our news channels and social media.
Sam Marroquin Despair (2024)
Seeing the body of work a second time, now in its entirety of over a hundred paintings, smartly curated by Kate Simmons, reinforced some of my earlier reactions and provoked additional observations. Unsurprisingly, my current (independent) reading also shifted the focus, and so will make an appearance here in a bit.
Sam Marroquin Starving (2024)
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On a number of dimensions, Marroquin’s work reminds me of that of Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered in Auschwitz. The German artist’s paintings were fluid, influenced by graphic design, amounting to the impression of a graphic novel. They were narrating the autobiographical experiences, early life and later suffering of a Jewish woman who had to flee state violence and racist persecution, to no avail. Caught in France, she was shipped to the camps, her paintings survived in hiding. It was a large body of cumulative work, depicting multiple facets of life under existential threat on pieces of cheap paper, with whatever coloring materials could be secured in exile. She added text to amplify the universal meaning of individual experiences.
Charlotte Salomon Life? Or Theater? Excerpts (1941-1943)
When the World Looks Away shows a lot of stylistic visual resemblance, eschewing conventional painting for a more graphic style. Manga books come to my mind. The compulsive inclusion of every aspect of the narrative is also present. Marroquin refers to the loss of life and limb, the hunger, the bombings, the absence of medical care or the difficulty to obtain it. She depicts the attacks on select groups beyond Hamas terrorists, journalists, medical personnel and aid workers included, on top of the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. The painter describes the intentional destruction of cultural and educational institutions, the fate of political prisoners. She also refers to the international protests, and the treatment of protestors as criminals. The artist uses script often by doubling and superimposing words, creating an echo effect that resonates across time. Just like in Salomon’s work, witnessing is one of the through lines of Marroquin’s approach.
Sam Marroquin Goodbyes (2024)
Over and over the current paintings return to the children: innocents swallowed up into a maelstrom of violence and grief, at times specifically targeted, least able to defend themselves against the dangerous pressures of hunger, disease and cold. Irrespective of type of conflict, partisanship, country, from the Middle East to Syria, Ukraine, Sudan or the Republic of Congo, young non-actors who are most in need of protection are sacrificed to the ravages of war. Orphaned, disoriented, starving, burnt and maimed, they induce such a fright into the empathetic viewer that you want to turn away.
Sam Marroquin A Fine Line Between Life and Death (2024)
Sam Marroquin Where to? (2024)
Sam Marroquin Starved to Death (2025)
The artist bears witness – and tries to compel us to same – to the agony war unleashes onto humanity, regardless of who are the perpetrators, who are the victims, what cause can claim to be justified or what lessons of history are ignored. (Regarding the Gaza conflict, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague is considering a case since late December 2023, claiming Israel was violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide through its actions in Gaza. It will likely take until 2028 to get a decision. Full arguments for the case from Israel are due next week, January 12th, 2026. If ICJ judges will find that both acts of genocide and incitement to genocide have taken place, their orders should bind states. However, there is really no mechanism to enforce international law, in particular international human rights law and international humanitarian law.)
Marroquin’s unflinching gaze on suffering, pain likely vicariously experienced when putting it into visual form across years of exposure, is remarkable. I would not have that in me. I can barely look at it for long amounts of time, which makes me ashamed.
Sam Marroquin To Grieve (2024)
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It’s one thing to feel shame about not meeting your own standards. It is an uncomfortable feeling, and saddening. Emotions run even higher when I am told by others, “You should be ashamed of yourself!” But I am also mindful of the converse — when, for example, I find myself angry that others are not ashamed by their (often tacit) acceptance of actions or events I regard as vile. I certainly find myself enraged when the powerful act hideously and with no sense of shame.
Shame, and its counterpart shamelessness, deserve a closer examination, given that they are ubiquitous, and clearly provoking massive reactions. They are of importance in my own ways of approaching the world, obviously including the reception of art. They are also important in configuring the world I live in, often not for the better (just think of all the shaming around body image, or sexual victimizing on the internet, as just one example.) Two recently published and/or translated books are currently on my desk to help understand what’s at stake.
David Keen’s Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion just arrived, so I can only report on the introduction, but am already intrigued. Keen is a British political economist and Professor of Complex Emergencies at the London School of Economics. The core of the book tackles how shame can be instrumentalized, in politics, in war, in social hierarchies that assign (and reserve) a space to victims or for perpetrators. Shame can be loaded onto people, often with nefarious purposes, and in turn falsely promised to be lifted (often by the same actors who impose it in the first place.) In a social-media linked society where shame and shaming is increasingly prevalent, “shamelessness itself can be sold as an attractive spectacle – a symbolic escape from shame, a taste of freedom, a flight from the constraints, disparagements, insults self-doubt and self-admonishments to which mere mortals are regularly subjected and subjecting themselves.”
Sam Marroquin Amputee (2025)
French philosopher Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Shame approaches shame from the psychological perspective of the individual at the intersection with society, inextricably linked. Shame can be instilled by being assigned an inferior place in a hierarchy – there are plenty of “shame-generating frameworks” like stigmatisation, stereotyping, and inferiorisation by mechanisms of race, gender and class, or sexualized violence. We internalize that these relegations are our fault, and correspondingly feel shame rather than disgust for the perpetrators. In this sense, shame silences, subjugates and damages.
However, the philosopher also believes that there is an element of anger and rage in shame, which will, if we turn it against us, be very destructive. If I look at massacres of civilian populations, for example, I might be enraged, ashamed at my powerlessness to do anything about it. Often, and particularly if I am implicated by association with a perpetrating nation or group, that shame might convince me to close my eyes towards the cruelty committed in my name. It is simply too overwhelming to feel the shame, so I blind myself to the facts.
Yet, and this is the core message of the book, shame can also spark positive action. It might become an “ethical” shame where we project ourselves into a future reflecting on actions that would or would not shame us. Shame can be a stimulant, in other words, for imagining possible worlds and behaviors promoting desired outcomes. We live in a culture that ver much wants to distract us from assessing the ethical standards involved in the nation’s actions. The author’s prescription: “A proper response to shame has the potential to draw our attention to injustices or moral failings instead, and rouse us to resist and attack the status quo.”
Shame can rouse conscience in some way, then, just as Marroquin’s work does by relentlessly reflecting a reality that questions the morality of our actions, even as remote bystanders. We have choices: to look at suffering or not; to avoid complicated conversations or not; to support those in need or not; to make our voices heard or not.
To imagine a better world, or support the status quo.
If shame works as a catalyst toward defying shamelessness: bring it on!
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‘When the World Looks Away’
Sam Marroquin
Jan. 5–Jan. 30, 2026
Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Artist Talk: Wednesday, January 14th from noon to 1pm.
Alexander Gallery is located in the Niemeyer Center at Clackamas
Community College.
19600 Molalla Avenue
Oregon City, Oregon 97045
Sam Marroquin World’s Child (2025)