Snake
Dance
Adrienne
Gaha
Greenwood
Street Project
April
14- May 27 2016
This
installation of new paintings by Adrienne Gaha provides opportunity to
interrogate the artist’s practice by pulling back to reveal a singular event
and zooming into explore emotive molecules of this larger tableau.
The
title 'Snake Dance’ incorporates both serious risk taking in order to gain an
advantage and, a slightly saucy, kitsch representation of what we perceive
as dangerous or sexy. The Hopi Indians danced with snakes and risked their
venom and charms in order to send them as intermediaries to the rain gods. At
the other end of the spectrum you have early 20th century eastern bodice ripper
movies. See Debra Paget’s snake dance in Fritz Lang’s “The Indian Tomb”, or the
more recent and ironic, “From Dusk till Dawn”, where Salma Hayak also does a
snake dance.
There
is opportunity in the expansion and fragmentation of the source material,
Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon” at the core. We are free to flirt, ogle and cosset
the characters and their properties. This openness to voyeurism brings the
viewer into the enveloping sensuality of the fixed gaze. However the rendering
of detail, erasures and veils are Gaha’s own provocations to the viewer
entering the pictorial space. In her own words “As in the things we find most alien to both our own sense of our
selves and our culture, I am curious about our fascination with the
dangers and/or rewards we perceive will come from taking it on and
attempts to neutralize its seductive power.”
The
group of paintings, each investigates detail and mood, each worked richly,
sketchily, abstractly in turn but always lush and painterly. The group builds
to explore the textures and enticements of a total mise en scène. While Gaha paints figuratively, she “is interested in the point where the paint
hovers on the edge of being descriptive of both the image and its own
materiality.”
In
a broader sense the “Snake Dance” is a metaphor for Gaha’s approach to painting
- a kind of subjective vs analytical toing and froing. It is a solitary
activity that is also meant to communicate to an audience an act that is also
shifting and in motion. To make the decision that the painting is finished
requires a constant refocusing and the transformation of an image be it hers
or someone else’s and so extends the range of footwork required.
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Adrienne Gaha
Detail
'Bacchus and Ariadne' [after Titian],
oil
on linen, 123cmx 97cm, 2016
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