Curio Cabinet

Title: Portrait of Geysha Kaua
Artist: Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977)
Created: 2019
Medium: Oil on linen
Dimensions: 59.75 x 48.25 in (151.5 x 122.5 cm)
Current location: Galerie Templon, Paris, France
 

It's not often that we see a clash of titans in the art world, yet these verdant new portraits of Tahiti's Māhū (third gender) community by Kehinde Wiley are anything but quiet about Paul Gauguin's work. Wiley is arguably one of the most important living portrait artists after having painted President Obama for the National Portrait Gallery last year. Geysha Kaua's pink and floral visage was painted during Wiley's stay in the Polynesian Tahiti island with the Māhū, who were respected in their societies until European missionaries made them outcasts. The Māhū fared no better under Gauguin's brush, mainly functioning as fetishized objects. "Gauguin features heavily in the imagination of France and her global interface—with that comes an entire history of complicated gazing," Wiley writes, "I interrogate, subsume, and participate in discourse about Māhū, about France, and about the invention of gender." With his new exhibit opening at the Galerie Templon in Paris, Wiley is ready to confront issues of colonialism head on and to show off the vibrant portraits of a long misunderstood community.
 

Below: more of Wiley's work in the series, including Portrait of Tuatini Manate,III; Portrait of Moerai Matuanui; and Portrait of Kea Loha Mahuta,II.
 

Image credit & copyright: Kehinde Wiley
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Photographer Danny Sepkowski says capturing this shot wasn't "the safest thing to do." Taken from the inside of a wave in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, the image required him to wait in the shorebreak and submit his Canon camera—and himself!—to repeated beatings from the ocean. Sepkowski wasn't able to look through the camera's viewfinder, so timing the right image took equal parts instinct and luck. The photographer was first drawn to underwater images as a high schooler, when he bought a disposable waterproof camera on a whim and was impressed by the basic device's ability to render "amazing moments." Nowadays, Sepkowski's gear includes a wide 100mm lens and waterproof camera case outfitted with special handles. Though he uses a magnifying macro lens, Sepkowski named the image after something much larger than anything in our planet's oceans: Nebula.
 

 
Image credit & copyright: Danny Sepkowski
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Artist: Aleksandra Ekster
Created: 1924
Medium: gouache on paper
Dimensions: 23.9 x 19.9 in (60.6 x 50.5 cm)
Current location: Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium, Deerfield, MA
 
Mmm… vitamin C and omega-3s. The shore is littered with an unexpected bounty in this quirky "still life" by Aleksandra Ekster. The Russian avant-garde artist was known for her cubo-futurist work, featuring moving objects that appear to look flat and three-dimensional at the same time. In this piece, the flatness comes from abstracted objects shown from multiple facets, such as the ships: their sails face us even though the vessels are moving right to left. The depth comes from Ekster's keen ability to juxtapose the background and foreground: blues and diagonal lines help set the sea farther back, while warmer values and circular patterns tie the foreground together. If this beach buffet seems like an odd food pairing, it's because the artist was playing off the painting's title—literally "the fruits of the sea" in French. Bon appetit!

Photographer Marinka Masséus proves a portrait is more than pretty poses and soft lighting. Her Chosen Not to Be Seen images find Dutch subjects with down syndrome entangled with obscuring objects—not unlike the social erasure they experience on a day-to-day basis. The above gaze of a sullen eye barely passes through knotted string, leaving the viewer feeling appropriately claustrophobic, even suffocated. About one in 700 people are affected by the syndrome, which is caused by an extra chromosome that produces developmental issues. Masséus was able to read Zwartboek, or "Blackbook", which was written by Dutch citizens on the experiences of living with down syndrome in the Netherlands. "Reading the collection of stories... broke my heart," Masséus said. "...misinformation leads to misconceptions and widely-held preconceived notions, which profoundly impact the lives of people with Down's." Masséus' buddhist and feminist studies have led her to treat these marginalized subjects not as outcasts, but as silent bearers of untold frustrations and grief, one stark black and white portrait at a time.
 

Below: more Chosen Not to Be Seen images, which recently took home the top prize from Lens Culture magazine's 2019 Portrait Awards.
 

Image credit & copyright: Marinka Masséus
 

Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore—in fact, these turbulent clouds just recently passed over Shasta County near Redding, California. A National Weather Service report issued a tornado warning for the areas between Anderson and Redding, roughly a 10 mile stretch of land. Residents who usually had views of flat farmlands, forested hills, and Mount Shasta's peak, beheld a psychedelic arrangement of lights and funneling storm clouds in the low precipitation supercell storm (a cyclone containing little water). Luckily, the clouds didn't cause any major destruction, although 1.5-inch-diameter hail rocks and some lightning accompanied the unusual weather. Cory Mueller of the National Weather Service remarked that low precipitation supercells are something of a visual marvel and "...typically very photogenic because you can see the storm structure very well." We just hope these photographers will keep themselves out of harm's way, especially if the next storm proves to be more dangerous!

 

Below: more images from the Shasta County storm clouds.
 

Image credit & copyright: Angela Walfoort, Cody Gayman, Sean Boren