NYAB Event - Sharon Servilio “Ghosts of the Monomythic Age”

Sharon Servilio “Ghosts of the Monomythic Age”

Long Island University/ Brooklyn Campus Art Galleries

This event has ended.

Sharon Servilio is a New York painter exploring the possibilities of building narrative through imagery. As a narrative painter she has had to consider the idea of collective psyche and universal myth, which are both alluring and suspect in the face of lived experience. Her work inhabits the tense ground between the joy of connection-making and the need to stay true to the messiness of the observed world.

In her series The Archeologists, the titular characters act as stand-ins for the image-obsessed painter. Relics of art history intrude upon the waking and dreaming lives of the archeologists, manifesting their fears and desires. By importing iconic images into mundane contexts, Servilio hopes to gain some understanding of their enduring power to evoke.

In another series called Optic Mythology, projections, mirrors, televisions, and other light-based technologies have replaced the supernatural as sources of our visions and illusions. The new pantheon consists of movie stars, cowboys, explorers and other American icons, and hints at an undercurrent of anxiety - about our relationship to nature, our violent history, and possible future calamities. With movie screens and projections as subject matter, the paintings contain images within images, which allows for strange juxtapositions and porous boundaries between disparate ideas. These newly formed connections facilitate an exploration of questions like: “What is myth’s role in my place and time in history? What forms can it take? What stories are mine to tell?”

Sharon Servilio was born in New Jersey in 1983. She received her BA from Brandeis University in 2005 and her MFA from American University in 2008. This is her first solo exhibition. Recent group shows include the Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, NJ, Liminal Art Space in Roanoke, VA, Printed Matter in New York, and Passenger in Detroit. She lives and works in Queens, NY.