sex
Maria Jean
sex
September 5-28, 2024
Opening Reception September 5 6:00-9:00 pm
sex is an exploration of carnal delight in the contexts of specific personally significant and enlightening experiences realized through visual amalgamations of design, technology, soft eroticism, reinterpreted iconographic motifs, and abstract innuendo.
“My interest in sex has long preceded my ability to comprehend even its most elemental meaning. Aiding in the development of this interest throughout childhood and adolescence was a restrictive upbringing in what is incontrovertibly among the most perverted of religious traditions, Roman Catholicism, which has not only played a role of gargantuan proportions in shaping my ever-evolving relationship with sex but has also engendered morally conflicting influences on the formation of my identity as a creative sensualist.
Despite unremitting parental and institutional efforts to prevent exposure to any degree or manner of supposed immorality, I began to develop a strong fascination with eroticism at an early age, a secret that I would keep for many years. As I reached sufficient maturity to engage in conscious consumption of popular media and the arts, I found myself intrigued by depictions of sensuality, nudity, and sexual expression, both natural and simulated – things in which I saw beauty but had been taught to condemn.
Nearly two decades would elapse before I would come to acknowledge and accept the intensity of my sexual nature and the different ways in which it desired to be explored. sex is an exploration of carnal delight in the contexts of specific personally significant and enlightening experiences realized through visual amalgamations of design, technology, soft eroticism, reinterpreted iconographic motifs, and abstract innuendo. The use of subtlety and ambiguity serves as an allusion to memories of early encounters with titillation, a concept that I would not possess the capacity to grasp until much later, while sly details invite a closer look and more intimate appreciation of their naughtiness. What you believe you see may be, if you so choose.”
Maria Jean
Maria Jean
sex
September 5-28, 2024
Opening Reception September 5 6:00-9:00 pm
Artist Talk: TBA
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday & Thursday, 6:00-8:00 pm
Saturday, 12:00-5:00 pm
Maria Jean is a visual fine artist whose work explores the intersection of physical and digital media, flirting with and ultimately obscuring the boundary between reality and artifice, while accenting recurring thematic and stylistic elements of nostalgia, kitsch, and sex in an unending pursuit of beauty.
(This exhibition was made possible through the generous support from Prosper Portland, PICA and the Ford Family Foundation)