Lolita 

Sarah Joncas made this pencil drawing, called Lolita, sometime after 1986. The title, of course, references Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel about a middle-aged man’s obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel was, and remains, contentious because it challenges conventional morality and explores themes of manipulation, desire, and the unreliable nature of memory. Here, Joncas borrows the name for her young subject, who poses with heart-shaped sunglasses and a lollipop, visually encoding themes from Nabokov's novel. But what is the public role of art? What are the politics of imagery? Joncas’s drawing reminds us that artworks do not exist in a vacuum. The artist is in conversation with the complex social history of this novel and we, as interpreters, must consider that legacy to understand the artist's intentions. Researching the history of censorship, moral panics, and literary adaptations of the book might help us better understand this artwork today.