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FROM TINY ACORNS… GROW MIGHTY OAKES:
JULIE OAKES – HUMAN SACRAFICE AT THE RIVINGTON GALLERY.
On March 3rd, Canadian-born artist, Julie Oakes, launched her first London solo exhibition with a flamboyant assault on the senses. Unveiling wall after wall of exquisitely sensual drawings – ranging from Greek busts to compromisingly discarded lingerie – Oakes announced her arrival in the East End with flair.
The exhibitions are titled Human Sacrifice. Human Sacrifice - Quercia Stories, is the first in the international trilogy of exhibitions with accompanying novellas. Human Sacrifice – The Revolving Door is set to open in Canada and Conscious Perversity either in New York or London. Human Sacrifice represents Oakes’ dual obsessions with High-Renaissance art and the high-adrenaline underworld of forbidden sexual encounters.
“Sex has been an ongoing theme in my work”, writes Oakes, and since her early shows in America in the 70s, she has shown no sign of faltering on her controversial mission to personally experience and record the seedy underbelly of life.
Oakes utilizes a distortion of text and information by layering extracts from her own novella across sepia, indigo and graphite pencil drawings at disorientating angles, in order to create levels of space within the whole image. As vision focuses on the writing, recollections of sexual encounters unfold, as if in the private pages of a diary. Images of Roman Senators, wounded animals, and the artist in self-portrait emerge from under the beautiful handwriting. In such a way, Oakes makes apparent the contradictions and dichotomies in human desire and human society.
The book, of the same title, from which the stories are drawn and the drawings intended to illustrate is based on the canto structure of Dante’s Inferno. The narrator Justine (Oakes’ alter-ego) offers herself upon the altar of self-examination and experience.
Amongst the 50 drawings in the exhibition, each on Italian paper and framed in a pitch-black frame; are 3 large-scale oil paintings on canvas. The paintings are prepared according to 15th century treatise; using rabbit skin glue, Bologna gesso and hand-ground pigment, and are the most accomplished demonstration of the artist’s vision.
The Death of Harmonia, a giant canvas depicting the wife of Cadmus in her wedding dress, is a painting after Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre that captures a moment of human sacrifice. Harmonia, the daughter of Zeus by Electra, is shown seated, the beautiful but cursed necklace made for her by Hephaestus already ripped from her neck. Admirable contrast is achieved between the dark, grasping arms of the male assailants, and the soft pale skin of Harmonia’s exposed chest. Onto the original composiotn Oakes has superimposed a column in front of which a lean dog glances towards the body of Harmonia’s maid. The entwined lizards that appear at the top of the fluted column are Oakes’ work, symbolising notions of sacrifice and cannibalism that she has found to be present in sexual relationships.
A long line of exhibitions stretch back in Oakes’ career, over three decades in fact, ranging from work in video and live performance art to the more traditional mediums of painting and drawing. She has studied Tibetan thanka painting under Sherab Palden Berut, as well as holding a Masters Degree in Art from NYU and a Masters Degree in Liberal Studies, Critical Theory from The New School University in New York City. She acted as the director of Headbones Gallery in British Columbia and raised two children from her marriage to Sir Christopher Oakes. She currently resides between downtown New York and rural Canada – locations that influence her work daily and play host to her inquiring mind.
Tom Carter