Unfeigned Mysteries
DIMIN
406 Broadway, NY
June 7 – July 12, 2024
Tribeca gallery DIMIN presents Unfeigned Mysteries, a group exhibition featuring New York artists Whit Harris, Sarah Alice Moran, and Elena Redmond. Unfeigned Mysteries opens on June 7th at 6 pm. Through the exhibition, the artists turn to Homeric hymns, the human form, and metaphors to explore the limits of spiritual imagination. Dripping with references to the religions of ancient Greece including Orphism (which promises its followers a better afterlife) and the Eleusinian Mysteries (which revolve around Demeter, Persephone, and the underworld), the exhibition deals with these secret sects and their revelations of the unknown, the afterlife, and the continuity of the soul.
Multi-disciplinary artist Whit Harris uses drawing, painting, and ceramics to explore disjointed depictions of the human body; her figures contorting themselves to recall the DuBoisian concept of “double consciousness” that underlies contemporary Black identity. Oscillating between naturalistic and cartoonish forms, these figures become metaphors for Harris’ adaptation to hostile environments that stem from sexist and racist social structures. The paintings featured in Unfeigned Mysteries were produced during a residency in upstate New York. In them, Harris portrays cloud formations as a metaphor for the possibility of human imagination and depicts a female nude climbing a hill to represent the rituals of the ancient Mysteries and the search for enlightenment.
Brooklyn-based painter Sarah Alice Moran draws similarly from mythological imagery, taking inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Homer’s Odyssey. Her paintings, created using acrylic paint on unprimed canvases laid flat on the ground, represent the duality of nurturing juxtaposed against aggression and predation. She utilizes imagery of humans, animals, and gods to create a space in which magic is real and various worlds exist alongside each other. Particularly interested in the blurred lines between myth and reality, Moran uses color and form by applying liquid with a variety of tools to the canvas and allowing watery pigments to mix and spread.
The third contributor to Unfeigned Mysteries, Elena Redmond investigates infamous pop culture moments and virality, and also depicts her own relationship with privacy, vulnerability and power, all through self-portraiture. She uses architectural elements and intersecting glazes to draw the focus from the elements of realism to the soft and darkening upper edges of the canvas and even into the unseen space beyond the painting’s view. Staying true to the exhibition’s theme, Redmond uses a “portrait of a self-portrait” to call back to the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection.
