06/28/2014
Most Wanted Fine Art @ The Waterfront
One of the works from my series
Stranger Than Life will be on display at Most Wanted Fine Art Gallery's brand new Waterfront location in Homestead. My image
Memory Of The Fall was chosen by curator, Scott Hunter among other works by many talented Pittsburgh artists. The image has special importance to me because it was the inspiration for the series and deals with my own personal history. The project is about our first encounters with the idea of death. The images explore the way the mind of a child processes these emotions, oftentimes recreating events into stranger than life experiences. To create these works I will be interviewing people from all walks of life searching for the moment of each person's realization of mortality and how the content of their experience is changed over time. I believe these memories have a strong and lasting impression due to their timing, happening at such a fragile and impressionable stage of life.
The first piece is about my own personal memory. When I was very young my mother told me not to climb on things. She explained that when she was a child, she knew a boy who fell out of a tree and died or so I remembered. Later in life while discussing the subject with my father, he clarified that it wasn't a boy at all, but was actually my mother who had fallen out of the tree and merely broke her arm. This is when I realized the story had either been changed in my mind or exaggerated to teach me a lesson. This sparked my interest and led me to wonder what amazing images might be hiding in the minds of others and how have they been distorted and for what reason.
In the image
Memory Of The Fall it is obvious that the boy has lost his kite in a rather ominous place and has failed in his attempt to retrieve it. His face is purposely covered by the branch commenting on the fact that he has no identity and is only real in the context of my mind. Also, notice that the girl walks away slowly and is transparent in her depiction, indicating that she is not a part of the boy's world. She is simply a memory of my mother's, sharing the same space with my version of the story. The image takes on a dreamlike quality, oddly beautiful and reminiscent. Inspired by the famous American painting,
Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth, it too amplifies a feeling of longing and a strange combination of melancholy beauty.
The work will be on display through July 9th.
* Please click the link to view in more detail.
http://www.christopherruane.com/Set/Stranger-Than-Life/Memory-Of-The-Fall *
