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Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Visual Art Currently Hanging: Casey Curran

Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 12:26 PM

The front-room centerpiece of Casey Curran's exhibition at Gallery IMA is a riff on the Leda-and-the-swan story. Painters, sculptors, and poets all love to render versions of Zeus's "visitation"—it's a rape with lots and lots of symbolic progeny.

Curran's version—an inversion (an inversion of a perversion? the inversion of your perversion is your friend? I digress)—was a hit at the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival this year.

Instead of one swan, there are two, their heads and long necks resembling Leda's spread legs, the couple becoming one body. The double-crotch is a furry toy lion with a blooming rose for a head.

The whole thing is mechanized, gyrating as you walk in and out of the gallery, dripping with feathers and jewels. You see it in broad daylight, but by rights it should be in a dark room of its own, under a faint spotlight, doing its thing.

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Casey Curran didn't really get hanged for this, did he? Even though I would have entitled this piece "Kenmore Seaplane Meets Flock of Seagulls," I still feel capital punishment is a bit harsh.

Posted by Cynic86 on October 19, 2010 at 2:22 PM