NYAB Event - Kira Greene "feastiality"

Kira Greene "feastiality"

A.I.R. Gallery

This event has ended.

A.I.R. Gallery announces Feastiality, an exhibition of new work by 2009‐2010 A.I.R. Fellowship Artist, Kira Greene.

Kira Greene’s recent paintings blend images of lusciously styled food with patterns associated with women in both Eastern and Western culture. The results of this juxtaposition are conceptual self‐ portraits that represent the plurality and multiplicity of Greene’s
identity as an Asian immigrant woman in America. The paradoxes and contradictions that characterize women’s lives particularly, immigrant women’s lives – inform Greene’s pairings of disparate elements in her paintings.

The patterns in Greene’s paintings symbolize the roles women play in various cultures, and are derived from historical fabrics used in women’s clothing and for domestic interiors. The food, which both clashes and harmonizes with the patterns, represents the body as well as the desire to consume and control. The play of Greene’s visually stimulating flat patterns, which evoke surface beauty and decorative artifice, against illusionistically rendered still lives which are both beautiful and “consumable,” invites reflection on the female experience across cultures, as well as the representation of female bodies in art.

The surfaces of the paintings are varied to create maximum complexity and to enhance the inherent sensuality of the paint. While the depiction of the food strongly references the Dutch still‐life tradition, the way Greene collages and breaks the picture plane references the practice of painting in the postmodern era. This divergence of styles imbues Greene’s work with collage‐like dissonance.

Kira Greene graduated from the School of Visual Arts, NY, with a MFA degree in 2004. Greene has shown extensively in group exhibitions in San Francisco, New York, and Hong Kong. This is her first solo show in New York.