By Dropati Sanichar
Science Fiction exhibits all the categories of ‘what ifs’ insists writer Octavia Butler. Science fiction, horror, and fantasy: they are never just ridiculous, impossible, far-from-realistic genres of art, but worlds of possibility.
An open call exhibition at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, just a short walk from the York College campus, turns any negative perspective on these genres around. Under the curation of Zachary Frater, ‘Parables of the Unknown: The Art of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror’ – a group show running from January 18 to March 1 – uses the art of myth and the fantastic to denote deeper societal conditions and satire.
The term ‘parable’ refers to a fictitious story that portrays a moral attitude. Keeping this in mind, Rute Ventura and Janet Brusselbach – two artists from this exhibition of fifteen creative thinkers – exhibit representative stances on societal prejudice and emotional turmoil where horror and fantasy signify intense feeling and imaginative qualities.
Both Ventura and Brusselbach are painters. They confront discrimination against queer people and the stigma of mental health using the portrayal of the extraordinary to bring awareness to the ordinary.
In Brusselbach’s richly colored oil on canvas, Tamamo-no-Mae (Shakira) (2020), the subject is the title’s protagonist Tamamo-no-Mae, also known as Shakira. The painting is displayed in the Community Gallery, to the left of the entrance, in a room where the curatorial focus is the minoritized person reclaiming their position as a fantastical one. There is a sense of uneasiness under the figure’s cynical gaze: Tamamo-no-Mae is a nine-tailed fox that transforms into a vindictive beautiful woman to deceive the powerful and evoke mischief.
Indeed, fox tails trail behind Tamamo-no-Mae. Before a background gradient of saturated colors ranging cool to warm, there is an eerie mood in the thick red, violet, blue, and light tan skin tone with grays, black and white in expressive mark-making. Brusselbach describes Tamamo-no-Mae as a queer person that she encountered in the world who became a part of her ‘Beloved Monsters’ series, which explores how queer or transgender folks are often misconstrued as deceitful monsters when, in reality, they are just people in need of love.
In Ventura’s almost monochromatic Disintegrated Trauma Projecting Shadows (2023), a woman in grayscale is suspended in the air with smooth and blended tones of oil on canvas. Exhibited in the Miller Gallery to the left of the entrance, it hangs among other works associated with a superhero theme, but it is a critical reflection on empowerment from the expulsion of trauma. It closes in on you – a portal opened from the body of its protagonist.
Ventura uses perspective drawing with a vanishing point behind the suspended woman to project her forward over a tiled pavement that cracks under her force. Only her skin and the surrounding light are warmer hues in dull surroundings. Backlighting casts shadows in front of the painting’s characters.
The woman’s eyes are clouded with light as her exposed body under scant clothing shows an incision in her middle. Out of this incision flow liquids, or perhaps air, that becomes animals with the aspect of bats and monkeys. Her palms splay and bones fix upright in tension.
The trauma is overwhelming: a mental breakdown, an explosion of inner demons that roam outside. In Ventura’s case, the stigmatized outsider is portrayed to imply a subtle sense of hope.
In Brusselbach’s Tamamo-no-Mae, seated on her wolf tails, the mythical figure is surrounded by colorful biomorphic shapes. As she reaches down, exposed, she still looks confident and dangerous. Her gaze never quite meets the viewer’s and she smiles, but almost wickedly; she reaches down with long, sharp nails extended. A jungle appears in her midst with leaflike shapes of red and violet – an abyss. A woman overwhelmed with dark emotions who, despite being present physically, is mentally absent. Her body is vulnerable, her hands tense, and her face lifted upwards under a gaze clouded with light.
Perhaps the light signifies the removal of inner darkness for more peace. The background is filled with clouds with the sun behind them and various creatures approach the viewer: it is a mental exorcism in which the sun ends pain.
When looking closely, one can see a streaky pattern. There are many vertical and diagonal linear strokes, as feather-like shapes of fur extending from the character can be broken into ovals and triangles in terms of simple shape. Textured contour line is used and organic, natural shapes can be seen.
When paying attention to the oil paint application, it is important to note that impasto application gives a more expressive feel to the work, as opposed to smooth blending, which would flatten the overall piece. Composition-wise, the piece is centrally focused, guiding the eye in a circular manner around the subject. Unity between the background and figure is seen from the way the clothes of the subject interact with the color scheme of the background, though the
In Ventura’s almost monochromatic Disintegrated Trauma Projecting Shadows (2023), a woman in grayscale is suspended in the air with smooth and blended tones of oil on canvas. Exhibited in the Miller Gallery to the left of the entrance, it hangs among other works associated with a superhero theme, but it is a critical reflection on empowerment from the expulsion of trauma. It closes in on you – a portal opened from the body of its protagonist.
Ventura uses perspective drawing with a vanishing point behind the suspended woman to project her forward over a tiled pavement that cracks under her force. Only her skin and the surrounding light are warmer hues in dull surroundings. Backlighting casts shadows in front of the painting’s characters.
The woman’s eyes are clouded with light as her exposed body under scant clothing shows an incision in her middle. Out of this incision flow liquids, or perhaps air, that becomes animals with the aspect of bats and monkeys. Her palms splay and bones fix upright in tension.
The trauma is overwhelming: a mental breakdown, an explosion of inner demons that roam outside. In Ventura’s case, the stigmatized outsider is portrayed to imply a subtle sense of hope.
In Brusselbach’s Tamamo-no-Mae, seated on her wolf tails, the mythical figure is surrounded by colorful biomorphic shapes. As she reaches down, exposed, she still looks confident and dangerous. Her gaze never quite meets the viewer’s and she smiles, but almost wickedly; she reaches down with long, sharp nails extended. A jungle appears in her midst with leaflike shapes of red and violet – an abyss. A woman overwhelmed with dark emotions who, despite being present physically, is mentally absent. Her body is vulnerable, her hands tense, and her face lifted upwards under a gaze clouded with light.
Perhaps the light signifies the removal of inner darkness for more peace. The background is filled with clouds with the sun behind them and various creatures approach the viewer: it is a mental exorcism in which the sun ends pain.
When looking closely, one can see a streaky pattern. There are many vertical and diagonal linear strokes, as feather-like shapes of fur extending from the character can be broken into ovals and triangles in terms of simple shape. Textured contour line is used and organic, natural shapes can be seen.
When paying attention to the oil paint application, it is important to note that impasto application gives a more expressive feel to the work, as opposed to smooth blending, which would flatten the overall piece. Composition-wise, the piece is centrally focused, guiding the eye in a circular manner around the subject. Unity between the background and figure is seen from the way the clothes of the subject interact with the color scheme of the background, though the emphasis is on her. Because of the way the woman leans forward, the piece is asymmetrical, creating movement, as though she’s approaching the viewer.
The piece also has a frontal light source, with many highlights on the character’s body as the darkened clothes and background indicates shadows. This adds a sense of depth. Overlapping and shading creates an illusion of space, and the fact that the works surrounding this piece were others from her “beloved monsters” collection adds harmony. Overall, there is also a sense of heaviness to the piece as the dark atmosphere dominates.
Both Ventura and Brusselbach work with conflicting elements, but when it comes down to the basics, night and day, both have the underlying symbolism of time. Ventura and Brusselbach’s paintings are different in composition but give off the same uncomfortable mood meant to denote societal trauma and hardships faced by their main characters. Light values and gray tones dominate Ventura’s work; contrasting vibrant and intense hues characterize Brusselbach’s.
And yet, despite being so different in color, they both give off a negative mood: the first, sad, the other, eerie. Ventura’s is a perspective piece in which the eye is guided towards the center in all directions. Brusselbach’s is centrally focused, but the eye moves in a circular motion due to the subject matter taking up the majority of the space.
Brusselbach’s is frontally lit and Ventura’s is backlit: the shadows fall in opposite directions, but whether in front or behind, they focus the viewer on supernatural traits. Each works with a sense of heaviness: Ventura’s thick paint on canvas and Brusselbach’s dark colors, also thickly applied. In these ways, these two have a spiritual connection of sorts in that they take the negativity festering around them and portray it beautifully in magical settings that force acknowledgment of their potential and power.
Both paintings are recent creations. In these times, society continues to make people feel like outsiders. Ventura was born in Portugal in a setting that she associates with poverty, hierarchy and torture. Brusselbach was raised by optical physicists in California and is known for work that combines a sense of human intimacy with depictions of radical relationships to technology.
Now based in New York, Ventura’s work centers on emotional experience. A Queens resident, Brusselbach works with the style of speculative realism representing subjects in imaginative spaces with surrealism. Ventura’s experiments are efforts to display illness to wellness in painting and video. Brusselbach’s highly stylized piece, made in Queens and part of her series, Beloved Monsters, depicts queer figures symbolically embracing ‘out-of-ordinary’ traits by becoming human-like monsters.
Similarly, Ventura exhibits how mental illness has always been and still is stigmatized, as therapy is seen in many cultures as taboo. Art serves to bring awareness to the conditions of trauma under our inflated industrial economies where self-care is another expense.
The motivation for art, from illness to wellness, is important to this exhibition on science fiction, fantasy and horror. For both artists, social norms create social monsters who take this marginalization as a source of empowerment and confidence.
Like author Ursula Le Guin’s definition of science fiction, the exhibition Parables of the Unknown can be seen as a bag holding the frightening yet transformative reality of how people reconceive themselves under societal expectations, ideal examples of how the fantastical finds it way out of social conflict to create beautiful pulsing lives of sensation and strength.
