Recalculating: New Paintings
Susan Bee

GALLERY I

May 25 - June 18, 2011

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 26, 6-8 pm

Many of the works in this show are based on movie stills, particularly film noirs. These mostly small oil paintings dramatize the relationships between male and female characters through the lens of the dark, violent films of the 1940s and 1950s. The paintings use a flattened and abstracted picture plane, as a starting point for uncanny narrative and figurative overlays that engage psychic dislocation, trauma, and incongruous mystical and religious iconography. These new works figure complex, sensual, dramatic tension, along with strong emotions, in an interwoven whole. The paintings confront, without resolving or sublimating, gender roles and power relationships. Bee’s focus is on the marked visual constellations that underlie key popular culture stereotypes

View the full Press Release here.