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M.M. Dupay and Nora Sturges With imagery that is rooted in art, literature, and popular culture the artists challenge our concepts of memory and myth, desires and journeys. Sensitive, intimate, and often humorous, these exquisitely crafted works take us on a series of travels through the Renaissance and Hitchcock’s sky full of birds, with a short side-trip through the mountains as Marco Polo struggles with new hiking boots. Thought provoking scenes ask us to re-examine a variety of characters as well as concepts rooted in childhood stories and things we thought we knew. |
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M.M. Dupay Ms. Dupay¹s collages are rooted in sensibilities developed and explored by artists from the Renaissance to the 21st Century. From the biting social and political critiques created by artists such as the Dadaist Hanna Höch, to mysterious and disturbing images reminiscent of Max Ernst¹s Surrealist works,Ms. Dupay gently, and sometimes humorously, brings us into conflict with our own experiences of beauty and youth, adulthood and reality, truth and the media generated concept of personal value. By juxtaposing and combining, and yes, manipulating the familiar with the obscure she creates images that drastically curtail our expectations of what we think we are looking at. Visual triggers, such as the smile on a baby¹s face or an Arcadian landscape, are often in conflict with the Rococo frame and the gown from Modern Bride magazine. But somehow they work, and they engage us in a dialogue that makes us conscious, and perhaps self-conscious of our memories and desires. Ms. Dupay is a graduate of Bowling Green State University where she received an MFA in Two Dimensional Studies. |
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Hitchcock Had it Easy |
 Wednesday's Child |
Nora Sturges MARCO POLO’S TRAVELS A few years ago I did a painting of Marco Polo bringing back spaghetti from China, and a friend who saw the painting suggested I read Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. The book is fiction consisting only of Marco Polo’s descriptions to the Kublai Khan of the cities he has visited in his travels. Sometimes it is easier to see clearly the formal narrative qualities of a work of writing than of a work of art. I loved the mood created in this book by the fact that the reader is only provided a series of shifting and clouded descriptions with which to weave a larger narrative. This reminded me of Renaissance manuscript illuminations and the Persian, Indian, and East Asian paintings that illustrate stories, where the story’s text is not present (as is usually the case for the viewer of such paintings in art books or museums). The viewer is prompted by the picture to construct a vague and changing story, a story with the mood of a dream or a half memory. In my recent paintings of imaginary events in Marco Polo’s travels, I am attempting to use a group of paintings in a similar way-- to form an absent story, and at the same time to explore ideas of xenophobia, tourism, exoticism and cultural difference. In these paintings, Marco Polo is cast as the quintessential tourist; he gets blisters from his new shoes, gets lost in inhospitable landscapes and is forced to try new foods. A wealthy westerner, he is both drawn to and made uneasy by the foreign-ness of the exotic places he visits. |
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Marco Polo Sightseeing, 2006, |
At the End of Five Days' Journey, |
