Art Exhibition and Artist’s Reception: "wrath is come” by Julia Shirar at Rowan Morrison Gallery

When: Saturday January 16th, 2010, 6 - 10pm
Show runs January 16th – February 20th, 2010
Gallery Hours: Friday - Saturday, 11 - 6pm

Rowan Morrison Gallery is pleased to present our first show of 2010; “wrath is come”: an installation of new paintings and drawings by Julia Shirar.

Shirar’s compelling life-size figurative paintings and drawings embody the combination of fear, greed, an all-too-human desire for truth and safety, and a dark, dark humor. In the world inhabited by her pensive figures, naked or semi-clothed, the Final Days have come. Unlike the fire and brimstone preachers she remembers from her Southern Baptist upbringing, though, Shirar is not suggesting that the Apocalypse is really in full swing. But what if it were? What if the end of civilization was taking place outside these quiet interiors, complete with falling frogs, blood, bombs, food riots, poisoned, polluted air and water?

Instead of picturing that chaos, Shirar’s images assert the primacy, for each of us, of our own mental architecture—of memory itself. She works from observation and imagination rather than photographs, with the goal of focusing attention on the present moment as a construction of a succession of impressions, both mental and physical. Such moments, she implies, are slowly altered into memory’s vast and unwieldy composite.

Artist’s website: www.juliashirar.com

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