Sirens Of The Zodiac/ Solo Show at Modern Eden Gallery 2020 The siren. In modern vernacular, it's an alarm, a warning, a call to flee. In ancient mythology, the sirens were creatures cast out by the gods to live on islands in the sea where they would lure sailors to their deaths. Originally imagined as half bird, half woman, they settled into the familiar form of mermaids, half woman, half fish: and in this twist, they merged with the sea. It was a significant step in imaginative evolution. This series of 12 figures is another, I propose. No longer are the sirens uniform and undifferentiated, they're re-imagined as a distinct pantheon in terms of the eternal emotional framework of the western zodiac. (Zodiac from the root of zoology, a menagerie.) As such, they're transcendent figures, rising above time and place, and simultaneously plunging eternally below, populating our collective emotional psyche. And, oh, by the way, they're all female. The series conceptualizes a emotional cosmology not in opposition to, or as a means to negate, the male, but to explore dimensions, present in men and women, but often cast into shadows – if not ignored altogether. Do they lure? Do they tease? Do they threaten? Or do they express essence and power – a potency that differs from the warrior figure, god or hero, of the ancients, the prototype that claims attention even today. There is, I believe, another power: complex, intricate, elusive, evolutionary, and sharp as any sword that divides flesh from flesh. And far more dangerous, as emotional imagination always is, with the possibility of sublime union.
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