Mood Music, Ginger W. Ware
Solo Exhibition
Mood Music, Ginger W. Ware Solo Exhibition
Curated by Rebecca Gray
The Art House Gallery for Artsy.net
Exclusively Online at Artsy.net
August 2024
A Dream Well Travelled; Hope Reborn
Review by: Kristen Beaulieu
Mood Music, Ginger Ware’s first solo show with The Art House Gallery is a retrospective that masterfully traverses a vast thematic territory—sensitively juxtaposing life’s dichotomies from the perspective of her artistic journey over the past 12 years, highlighting lyrical interconnections between what one sees, hears, feels and believes.
The first painting in the show, Crescendo/Decrescendo is a brilliant riot and perhaps the best example of Ware’s mastery of technique. Both abstract and representational, this painting demonstrates Ware’s strong command of value, color, line, gesture in a single chaotic composition. The vibrant red/green palette creates a stop/go feeling that signals the theme of creative tension that continues throughout the show. The Colonizers is another painting that equally strong technically and nods to Toulouse-Lautrec’s bourgeoise interiors. The Colonizers is an interesting counter point to Hi(gh) which is informed by the symbolism of Paul Gauguin.
Ware’s creative tensions are endless; many derive from images gathered from the painter’s travels throughout Africa, Asia, Europe and North America interpreted through Christian references. For example, Queen of Heaven is a portrait of a subsistence farmer in rural Burkina Faso as the Christian Madonna with cherub.
Ware’s self-portrait Lazarus Comes Forth in Nevada continues the biblical references and juxtaposes civilization and wilderness, sin and salvation, death and rebirth. The trope of the woman (crying out) in wilderness in repeated in Woman Wisdom and Our Voices and contrasts with the joyful, hopeful female figure in Bella e Brava, 2023. In addition to her paintings, Ware’s handwoven scrolls are included in the exhibition. Like her paintings, they combine Christian references with cross-cultural references (in the case of Five Faces Scroll and Shrouded II, those of pagan antiquity).
Ginger Ware is an exciting addition to the Art House’s roster with her strong technical mastery of craft well informed by Western art historical tradition, and an audacious personal vision that acknowledges timely (and timeless) human paradoxes and seeks to transcend them.