Artist, Ida Applebroog: With all of these images, you're actually walking into the middle of a story that you have to sort of put together by yourself.
My name is Ida Applebroog. The work we're talking about is a Chronic Hollow.
With all of my paintings and the structure, I use them as predellas. They're almost like altarpieces. When you go into a church and you see different images and they're in different layers. I just have connecting images but they're not actual connections in a way that one reads a story from the beginning to the end.
At the top of the painting, you see the image of the woman sitting there with a gun. Why is she sitting there with a gun? Is she protecting herself? Is she going to shoot somebody?
Narrator: Then, below this woman with a gun, Applebroog has painted an image of a chair.
Ida Applebroog: I took a designer chair for two and surrounded it by sandbags. It relates to the execution of the Rosenbergs. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of spying and they were sentenced to the electric chair for treason. I'
At the very bottom, the panel with the two children holding the American flag. And you can take that from your own memory—the viewer's memory—as to what an American flag means to them.
And at the far right, the falling bodies.They might be acrobats.They might be falling off; you know, it might be what happened at 9/11.
I have been asked very many times, why is your work always so involved with violence? And [laughs] my answer is always, "It's not me that's involved with violence. It's the world that's involved with violence."