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Email PageSex, Death, and the Spirit
September 5, 2006- September 30, 2006
Reception: September 9, 3:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Nicole Maynard
Bowery Gallery
530 W 25th StThe new season opens at the Bowery Gallery with "Sex, Death, and the Spirit," a solo show by painter/printmaker Nicole Maynard. Visitors to the gallery can expect to see a mixture of sex, religion and politics; all the things we are not supposed to discuss at a dinner party. Maynard introduces her show with a painting called The New Eve. The shocking thing about the painting is that not only does Eve have a penis, but it is in the form of the snake, AND she appears happy about this: her lips form into a not-quite-so-enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. The apple hasn't been bitten. Instead of being manipulated by the snake the reverse is true as her hands firmly grasp her new appendage. The creation story includes the borrowing of body parts (Adam's rib); it works. Eve is an attempt at going back to the source, the supposed "root of all evil." Eve is the scapegoat for us all.
Another reference for this painting is the photograph of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe in which she has a broad smile and carries her very large sculpture of a penis which she called Fillette (a French term referring to a young and inexperienced girl). Both Bourgeois and Mapplethorpe are known for the sexual politics surrounding their work.
Content-loaded, the pictures manage to be painterly and rich while the prints pack a punch like all graphic work should. Maynard's imagery includes: Eve, bulls, horses, cages, women, anatomy, birds, butterflies, and veils. The identity of forms, their juxtaposition, and the way in which they are depicted unlock fresh ideas and express new ways of looking at power struggles. The mysterious is often powerful.
In the large painting, American Ingenuity and Ownership, reference is made to Picasso's Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon. One of the women is depicted wearing a berka, but only over her head; the rest of her figure is a nude Picasso. Picasso's painting is iconic of western modernity and the women are in a brothel. Maynard's juxtaposition evokes the East's fear of western influence.
Eve Doing Adam is the most pornographic image in the exhibition. It is a woodcut, a medium chosen for its inherent relationship to nature. The snake wrapped around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is central to the image while Eve, in horror, looks on from one side at the repercussions of the tasted apple. She sees herself unhappily performing oral sex on Adam, graphically portraying the passage from Genesis, "...yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."
The painting Homage to Al Gore, is a vertical rectangle with an oval landscape within it surrounded by white. A large cloud also acts like a hole; the landscape appearing to drift away in a white sky along with it. The words "ownership, greed, power, wealth, immortality" as well as the sentence, "I see me and the world disappears" reflect the narcissism involved in turnings one's back on the environment.
Maynard is hopeful her work will spark discussion. In a time of war and global warming, there is much to talk about. "We need to part the veils in our minds."
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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Bowery Gallery was last updated: 2008-11-20
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