Ellen Kahn "Alice Revisited"

440 Gallery

poster for Ellen Kahn "Alice Revisited"

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Kahn’s work combines elements that are both personal and universal while exploring the confluences and associations between intellect and intuition, waking and dreaming, fantasy and reality. The work interweaves layers of images derived from botanical prints, childhood photographs, linear elements, text, and illustrations—including those based on John Tenniel’s original ones from Carroll’s books—to create evocative drawings and paintings that have an edginess camouflaged by a deceptively innocent nostalgia. Color is muted in both the paintings and works on paper, implying a dream state, a delicate place in which images dance and collide, forever recombining to make new impressions.

Kahn’s paintings and works on paper focus on the psychological struggle that is involved with trying to break free from childhood and move out into the world to discover one’s own identity. As in the famous Sisyphus myth, where Sisyphus keeps trying again and again to push a heavy boulder up a hill only to be pushed back continually by its weight, Alice tries to journey forward and explore wonderland only to continually be pushed back again and again by all of the strange and unexpected barriers that try to stop her. The text in these works references two specific passages from the Carroll books: one from Through the Looking-Glass, in the chapter called “The Garden of Live Flowers,” where no matter which path Alice chooses it always twists back to her house, and the other from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, right at the beginning where Alice falls down the rabbit hole only to discover that she cannot get through the little doors into the garden beyond.

[Image: Ellen Kahn "Not Going IN" 12 x 16 in.]

Media

Schedule

from February 19, 2009 to March 29, 2009

Opening Reception on 2009-02-20 from 18:00 to 20:30

Artist(s)

Ellen Kahn

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