AMoCA Collection | In Media Res, oil on canvas, 65” x 59”, 2008
RAIR | 2005-06
Theresa Pfarr |
With an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from the University of Cincinnati, Theresa's work continues to "...question and praise the iconography of advertising and its mode of symbolic function. I want to find the breaks and connections in our visual understanding across and between high and low culture, both real and simulated.
"I am working to forge and discover parallels between the images of children and women in the media and in painting, their shared conventions for beauty and the spaces they both create and inhabit in America's youth culture."
Advertising images are the impetus for these paintings. The images invade my space and I carry an incongruent collection of them in my mind. I respond to their aggression through painting.
"I could no longer console myself with Rilke's line: "Sweet as memory the mimosas steep the bedroom"…….The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent…)" Roland Barthes from Camera Lucida
In "Lady Lazarus" Sylvia Plath asks us, "Do I terrify?-The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?" Theresa Pfarr's women and children -shy, disdainful, bone-tired, contorted, and defiantly vulnerable-gaze directly at us with the same imperative: Do I terrify? Is this what you wanted? This exaggerated swagger and hip-cock, these shoulders like knives, my neck thrown back like this, my wrists bound by invisible lines?
The first impression given by these figures is that they are fashion plates, a body in pieces, a dressed window, but look closely. It is hard to do this, to withstand the judgment in these postures and faces painted for the stage, the marketplace, war.
Every viewer becomes their maker, because these figures are the products of our desire. They emerge from gorgeous static-color fields both intuitive and precise-and are arrested at just that moment before they return to nothingness, their natural state. For these are no longer women and they know it; they are impossibilities and they all look like they're in danger. Their sorrow is ethereal and in the end more beautiful than their surfaces of longing.
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is just what I want. . . .
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
"A Birthday Present," Sylvia Plath
— Leigh Anne Couch, poet, 2006
Roswell Museum and Art Center
Rair exhibition • Theresa Pfarr •July 22 - September 3, 2006
