Shawn Bishop Leo "Femme Fatale"
Leo Kesting
This event has ended.
Shawn Bishop Leo explores the archetypal characters from Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, through innovative mixed-media and compositional technique. Shawn's multi-layered pieces incorporate vintage wallpapers, fabrics and found objects to, as she explains, "ground the subject matter in the visual world that we are exposed to. The patterns are often repetitive and geometrical but when layered become jumbled and irrational, pushing background into foreground, object into subject and subject into symbol." In this particular exhibition Leo's use of the stereotyped feminine art as domestic craft are paired against the strong emotional portraits displaying the feminine mystique in coiled ferocity.
In K.O., 20" x 24" mixed media on canvas 2008, a woman is presented with her fist cocked back ready to strike. The under-painting’s streaked rays converge toward the star strewn edge where an imaginary victim lies just outside of the canvas. Here the swirling shapes of the wallpaper evoke vaginal shapes as they swirl from background to foreground. The embroidered brass knuckles at the bottom left turn feminine adornment into weapon as shredded fabric and tangled threads undulate over the surface. The figure seems to literally punch the stuffing out of her opponent and yet her dominance has an almost relaxed self-contained expression in the features.
Leo describes her imagery as "oscillating between the coy and the fierce, a sort of parlay between dominance and submission." In Connected, the heroine clutches a telephone gazing earnestly into the distance. The crackled “sky” of the background symbolizes the intensity of her conversation while the encroaching floral motifs seem to be a sort of feminine laurel partially adorning her features while simultaneously obscuring them. Multi-national coins lay scattered over the surface representing the universal currency of women’s coercive lingual abilities.
[Image: Shawn Bishop-Leo "Connected" mixed media on canvas, 18” x 18"]
Media
Schedule
from July 17, 2008 to August 03, 2008