Press Release
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Press Release
Renee McGinnis constructs a body in her painting that exists
at the intersection of multiple discourses. Its often
full-frontal confrontation with the viewer establishes an
iconicity that resonates with themes of Pop and mass
culture--the comic book or action-film hero, the television
body seen in series like Xena and Hercules. These hard
bodies, with their smooth muscles and metallic clothing seen
against landscapes reminiscent of primordial bogs or the
surface of the moon , have a specificity that can make the
viewer squirm. While the full availability of the body
smacks of antecedents in classical art such as Mantagna's
St. Sebastian or the figures of Sandro Botticelli, the
hardness of these surfaces is almost impossible for the
viewer to absorb, inserting into the play of beholding a
struggle with the impulse to turn away.
It is just this anomaly that is the location of McGinnis's powerful irony concerning the structure of the self in a media culture. Not only is any individual's maintenance of an unfragmented surface presented as an interface with the world a task of near-Herculean proportions, but it is constantly threatened by an inexorable flood of external images that, as paintings such as these suggest, succeeds in uninterruptedly haunting, if not inhabiting, the individual's persona, both conscious and unconscious. McGinnis's images raise the specter of image as mirror, and the body here mirrored is one threatening in its broken appearance of integration, a body that can hardly hear itself think.
These paintings, as they suggest what we might or already have become, assault us with the terror of the empty grandiosity of collapsible super men and women. This allegory's assumption of figurative and representational garb becomes ultimately a surface of unrelenting challenge. McGinnis's conflation of these new heroes and heroines with earlier mythologies raises questions of gender roles and pairing. In a culture in which the individual's knowledge of self is enslaved by surrounding images of buying and selling, escape into the realm of relationship and connection can be nothing more than an empty fantasy of oversized and impenetrable narcissism. McGinnis uses her keen awareness of this dilemma in works that masterfully serve as an important, though difficult, warning.