May 14 – June 5/ Vétiver Night Women by Brianna McCarthy

Medulla Art Gallery is pleased to invite you to Vétiver Night Women by Brianna McCarthy

Opening reception: Thursday 14th May 2015
Time: 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Venue: Medulla Art Gallery
#37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain.

RSVP: 1(868)740-7597 or medullaartgallery@gmail.com
Exhibition continues until: Friday 5th June 2015
Gallery hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-2pm.

Artist Talk/Special presentation:
Thursday 28th May 2015
Featuring: Jonathan Barcant of Vetiver TT, Ecological Engineer & Environmental Activist.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

‘Vetiver Night Women’ is a reflection on traditions. In this series Brianna McCarthy presents a meditation on the consummated individual and communal energies of women. It was encouraged by an investigation of the course of revolutions from the perspectives of female persons who carry in their beings messages from ancestors and stories for descendants while firmly locating self in a cosmic space.

McCarthy achieves in this presentation a transmutation of her understanding of: memory, solidarity, will to power, the resolution of nostalgic yearnings and calls to action change. Her use of the ‘Vetivier’ image invokes the plant’s magical feminine associations. She engages the physical and metaphysical worlds. Through an alchemic process she creates an altar on which she lays for either sacrifice or for adoration, a pantheon of manifestations encoded with the energy of the Divine Feminine.

This is an interpretation of the night sky in which constellations, with their mythical references, are represented on literally black bodies to signify the retelling of narratives that inform culture. McCarthy capsizes former ideas of men as archetypes of power and establishes women as heroes. This is a sextant for the artist. She presents in her stylized charts of the heavens an idea of every woman as an agent of the universe, tracing coordinates along their bodies and faces. This is a representation of the processes of self-discovery and self-actualization within known and unknown spaces.
Amanda T. McIntyre, 2015.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Brianna McCarthy is a mixed media visual communicator working and living in Trinidad + Tobago. She is a self-taught artist and aims to create a new discourse examining issues of beauty, stereotypes, representation as well as the documenting the process – particularly poignant in an ever smaller digitally connected world. Her form takes shape through masking and performance art, fabric collage, traditional media, and installation pieces.

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