Drive By (2009, 14 x 18", oil on linen)

SUSAN BEE
RECALCULATING: New Paintings

A·I·R Gallery 111 Front Street #228, BKLYN NY 11201

May 25 – June 19, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 26, 6 – 8pm

Gallery Hours: Wed. – Sun., 11am to 6pm

Susan Bee Website.
Digital preview: thirty-seven new paintings online.

A·I·R Gallery.

“Many of the works in this show are based on movie stills, particularly film noirs. These mostly small oil paintings dramatize the relationships between male and female characters through the lens of the dark, violent films of the 1940s and 1950s. The paintings use a flattened and abstracted picture plane, as a starting point for uncanny narrative and figurative overlays that engage psychic dislocation, trauma, and incongruous mystical and religious iconography. These new works figure complex, sensual, dramatic tension, along with strong emotions, in an interwoven whole. The paintings confront, without resolving or sublimating, gender roles and power relationships. Bee’s focus is on the marked visual constellations that underlie key popular culture stereotypes.” —From the press release.

e·

Cousin Erasmus.

e·

I’m reading Elise Stewarts’s books Paradise and Opium Valentines.

These are works of ancient formulae. The Ficinian theurgy — the theory of love as a form of natural magic, enough to produce intersubjective erotic phantasms loaded with the emotion of passion. And thus her reader becomes her prey.

Elise Stewart is a specialist in the poetry of transitive affection.  Her books are published by Masque Publishing.

“Opium Valentines”

Night-time is the dancer,
my opium valentines, around
who’s shrouded mist I wander,
tempted by the gentle orb of
candle-light upon my dark-lit walls.

Yes —
the twilight hours, come not
soon enough —
with the sip of deep red vine,
to forbade this thirsting mouth.
To permit these eyes to audience
each mythical scene — unveiled.

Captivated, I must engage this
prophecy, drink the maddened
eye of pleasure, until the head,
heavy with delirium, sinks into
the sedative of sleep.

Until enslaved — I succumb to the
yearning depths of night,
and into the lure of dreams
— must fall.


e·

The spring/summer 2011 issue of The Tower Journal, edited by Mary Ann Sullivan, is online.

e·

The English poet Elise Stewart.






“Conceptus” a video poem by Elise Stewart & Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Including excerpts from the poetry of Elise Stewart and Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Vocals, music and video by Elise Stewart




e·