Mary DeVincentis

Solo Show

Sept 22 - Nov 13, 2022

Mary DeVincentis, The Consolation of Birds, Oil on canvas, 60 × 48 in

Mary DeVincentis Solo Show
Curated by Tappeto Volante
Opening on September 22nd, 2022, from 7 PM to 9 PM
On view until November 13th, 2022

Tappeto Volante is delighted to present Walking with Ghosts, a solo show of paintings by Brooklyn artist Mary DeVincentis which opens on Thursday, September 22, 2022.
 
Painter Mary DeVincentis is interested in how we humans make sense of our lives and the world around us through storytelling. Our stories, whether from myth or memory, imagined or experienced, connect us to our core aspirations, desires, and fears. Aiming to "strike a wordless chord of recognition in the viewer," her work draws upon the idiosyncrasies of personal experience, sincerely and truthfully excavated, to express the universal.
 
With the fluidity of calligraphy, and while retaining her painterly mark and maintaining the materiality of each work in balance with its illusion, DeVincentis creates works of emblematic power. She develops her imagery from a wide range of sources, both eastern and western, such as Japanese haikus, Sufi poems, Murakami essays, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Emily Dickinson's poem I heard a Fly buzz-when I died, as well as from song lyrics, euphemisms, dreams, and personal history.
 
Mary's paintings embody the hypnagogic lucidity of a waking dream, inhabiting an ambiguous state between sleep and wakefulness, life and death. The protagonists in her work are humans, animals, and elements of nature, which together weave narratives that are multi-dimensional in nature and open to multiple interpretations and perspectives.
 
Animals, often depicted with the female figures in Mary's work, appear as compassionate companions and as vessels for complex emotional states. Women appear, often seeming joyful but also distressed, in roles that include the heroic, the villainous, and the divine; figures either penitent or defiant, akin to Mary Magdalenes and ascending Ophelias who are neither angelic nor seductive but redeemed, perhaps from the victimizations of patriarchy. In one such painting, a woman psychic reads the circular Motherpeace tarot card deck, symbolic of the empowerment of women through the exploration of their spirituality and creative potential. 

The selection of paintings in Walking with Ghosts centers around the themes of the 12th-century Persian poem The Conference of the Birds by Attar of Nishapur, referenced in Mary's painting Consolation of the Birds. The show metaphorically moves through seven symbolic stages, as do the birds in the epic poem. In the verses, each bird acts as a representational allegory of a human fault. In their quest to reach enlightenment, each must individually but as a whole, cross seven valleys: Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Wonderment, Poverty, and Annihilation, bringing the seeker/viewer through a journey into a space where both the past and the future exist in the timeless now.