I just dropped off the last of the photographs to be framed for my next solo show, opening in October at the Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland. It’s my 8th solo show there in as many years.
The project is called Allegory of Inclination, the title borrowed, well, outright stolen from Artemisia Gentileschi. Artemisia was commissioned by the great nephew of Michelangelo to paint a picture celebrating his genius at the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. Artemisia’s painting is an allegorical celebration of inborn artistic ability–the inclination towards genius.
My project gathers together various themes that have permeated my output for the last several decades, to create an allegory of aesthetic and sexual desire, the frustration of our voyeuristic impulses, and the quest to find beauty in the mundane and overlooked.
The imagery includes curtains, which both hide and reveal, flowers, furry bodies and big bellies. The picture above is the first image in the series, a photograph of a fragment of a painting by Caravaggio. Caravaggio used paint, shadow and fabric to theatrically frame and isolate his visual narratives and subject matter. Here I’m borrowing a curtain from one of his paintings to introduce the allegorical narrative to follow.
I’ll post more previews from the show as we get closer to October.