JENNY CARPENTER: MADAGASCAR / May 11-July 1, 2007
It
goes without saying that all artists search for truth. Yet the manner
and manifestation of that truth rely heavily upon the demands of talent
and the rigor of what objectively fulfills an artist’s creative need. In
the case of Jenny Carpenter, we have a painter whose work ardently and
continuously fulfills the desire to manifest character. In her newest
body of work, Carpenter has moved beyond the culturally stamped
impressions we find in fashion magazines, and has traveled to another
marginal territory—the precincts of Madagascar, in Africa. What she
found there speaks both to a sense of the universal and the ‘other’.
As the artists states: “My current work pulls from a recent trip to southern Africa, in particular, Madagascar, from the women that inhabit the remote villages on the islands off the west coast. I painted these women from a culture that I will never fully know. I found myself taken with their overt beauty, not in terms of their physical appearance, but rather in what was concealed behind the melancholy expression in their eyes. It was this lack of information that I found truly compelling, causing an unsettling feeling, a discomfort. I sought something greater from them than simply a pretty face or a diverted gaze. I wanted from them what is missing in myself.
As the artists states: “My current work pulls from a recent trip to southern Africa, in particular, Madagascar, from the women that inhabit the remote villages on the islands off the west coast. I painted these women from a culture that I will never fully know. I found myself taken with their overt beauty, not in terms of their physical appearance, but rather in what was concealed behind the melancholy expression in their eyes. It was this lack of information that I found truly compelling, causing an unsettling feeling, a discomfort. I sought something greater from them than simply a pretty face or a diverted gaze. I wanted from them what is missing in myself.
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