recent paintings
June 11 - July 11, 2010
Jennifer Nehrbass
WEEP AND WONDER
When Odysseus returned home after years of war and adventure, he brought with him a taste for revenge and violence. Suitors who had pursued Penelope where slaughtered while twelve of Penelope's handmaidens were strung by their necks from a gallows on the ship, examples of treachery and disloyalty to the absent master.
Inspired by Margaret Atwood's book, The Penelopiad, this series of paintings imagines each of the twelve maidens as oval cameo portraits expressive of modern dilemmas, simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Ambiguity, realism and fantasy play atmospherically in a narrative moment akin to magic realism.
Drawn from a Victorian obsession with sex and death, these portraits speak to forbidden thoughts and desires, suggesting that what is hidden from, and forbidden to the maidens, is ultimately denied to the viewer. What the portraits yield is an intimacy of time and place that meanders through rich details and nuanced perplexity. For the artist, bafflement is as necessary to experience as delicate reasoning.