My recent work is named “Take a piece of Dionysus”. It is a piece that was planned as an installation made of twenty paintings. Each of the paintings is a square of 8”x8”m which can be arranged to join into one coherent scene or rearranged in different ways. Each piece is also an individual art piece that can be shown separately.
The painting was inspired by Titian’s painting “Bacchus and Ariadne”. To create it I used acrylic, fabric and plaster in a technique developed over the past few years. For the fabric in my painting, I used actual fabric, molding it to create a 3D effect.
The inspiration for this work came while I was exploring the issues of identity and gender which are prevalent in our society. I was researching different figures in mythology, and reading about Dionysus I found stories dealing with complex gender and identity questions. In one of the stories for example it is mentioned that he was born a boy but raised like a girl. In yet another reference in the Orphic tradition, the "first Dionysus" was the son of Zeus and Persephone, and was dismembered by the Titans before being reborn, similar to the way this art installation can be rearranged at will.
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