Tuesday, November 6, 2007
MB's Muses, Furies, and Fates
The community college I work at has lately been playing it safe, from my point of view. For example, the political mainstream commentator David Gergen is going to be a speaker tomorrow.
The blandness is being challenged downstairs from where Gergen is speaking with political artist MB Condon's art project that explores women and war, The Red Thread. Her work has lots of pink and expresses loads of anger and outrage, but there is a wonderfully thoughtful framework at the heart of her project, not random rage and imagery.
The pieces in the show are divided thematically into thirds. There are a number of works where MB is depicting herself, mainly in line drawing as Greek Fates or Moirae: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Then there is the Furies depicted as blood thirsty spike -heeled Condi Rice and her lot. But the project's greatest strength is in her tribute to Muses.
MB's three Muses are Virginia Woolf and her essay Three Guineas which was her scathing response to the Spanish Civil War, Simone Weil and her inversion of Homer's Illiad, and Susan Sontag's with her final major length essay "Regarding the Pain of Others"
The Sontag piece is one of the more striking comments of media I have seen of late. She resequenced 65 pages of the November 2006 Marie Claire magazine which featured the first in-prison interview with Lyndie England a fashion spread full of women separated from their husbands and lots of imagery where Marshall McLuhan could easily find evidence of what he called the Mechanical Bride.
Check out more of Condon's work. It will be on display at the Archer Galleryat Clark College in Vancouver, Wa until December 5.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:21 PM
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