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This untitled work addresses and explores issues of politics, colonialism, and gender and speaks to the role objects play in the “rapport de force” (balance of power) between the center and the marginalized. The inspiration for the work comes from a statistical analysis that found one-third of the cigars produced around the world are smoked by leaders of countries and heads of large corporations, predominantly men. A cigar, bullet, and lipstick alone hold their own innocuous meanings, but taken together they spark a conversation about power. The cigar is representational of economic power, the bullet of violent power, and the lipstick of sexual power. Blain’s work looks at the interplay between these power structures and challenges one to consider the ways they inform the landscape of the social and political.