Article in LASANTA_CULTURA_VISUAL_EMPORIO EMPORIO Published on 8/05/2009
Small article in LASANTA_CULTURA_VISUAL_EMPORIO, an art and culture magazine from Barcelona. You can check out the magazine here, or read the english transcription below.
Tara McPherson LASANTA_CULTURA_VISUAL_EMPORIO, #3
The female figure in my art represents a glimpse into an emotional state that is specific to an idealized moment. Whether she is flying, frozen, or battling against something, she is imbued by a sense of purpose and strength. Sometimes she is an aspect of myself, at other times she is an aspect of others. Above all, she is bursting with hope.
By means of an extraordinary fusion of femininity and star constellation, Tara McPherson projects in her illustrations, comics and paintings, an oneiric universe imbued with an aura of mystery and ambiguity.
It is precisely in this context where McPherson's main protagonists and alter egos are born and raised out of the particles of water. All of them are solitary female figures of captivating beauty, incarnations of the eternal Amazon, symbols of life and female empowerment. But above all they are living metaphors of all contained emotion in every interpersonal affair. The presence of a heart-shaped hole in the middle of their chest expresses the non--verbal way in which love, pain, anguish and loss become somatised in all their brave, yet fragile bodies during their circle of life.
Inspired by her background in astrophysics, McPherson places her characters within an intergalactic landscape, within which symbols as diverse as monsters, balloons, swords, and skulls, are intertwined against psychedelic backgrounds. But it is in the same context where an ambivalent encounter takes place between the supernatural and an underlying, still very down-to-earth feminism.
Though apparently belonging to a different world, McPherson's visions are thus nothing else but the aesthetic materializations of an intimate and close universe, alimented by a vivacious imagination. An imagination which transgresses with ease the frontiers between the gothic and the pop, the ethereal and the sinister, innocence and wisdom; an imagination that does not hesitate to bring together what initially originated as a commercial comic strip with an artistically conceived project.
This hybridization of practices is perhaps the reason for which McPherson's oeuvre approaches a territory beyond the imaginary and pictorial. Behind an intuitive practice drawing upon the somatization of the emotions, behind the pureness of forms, lines and colours, McPherson comes to reflect, in a wider sense, the way in which the ludicrous art of the street becomes "somatised," felt and experienced when entering the field of institutional art.