The Unrepresentable: Art & Sexual Violence

tinna
savini
A general theme in my work is the observation of
emergent patterns and how the accumulated relationships of
those patterns are contained for examination in a pictorial space.
This is somewhat like capturing an inflight creature for a closer
look before in your open hand it flies away. Traditional means
and methods are relied on in the pairing of painted, verticallyoriented,
slight rectangles and longer, clearly horizontal,
rectangular canvases. In the vertical panels, a human presence
is meant to be invoked while the longer horizontal panels offer
the subject of landscape--not as much as a natural passage but
as a perceptual one. Whether human or natural, the forms seek
definition from each other as boundaries and borders, “self and
other,” intended literally in their interdependence and non-literally
in their meanings.
Some years ago when I finished the piece Orb and
Shadow, I immediately knew it had to do with a “woman’s view”
of the world in a cosmic sense. The circles and curves abide in
the long tradition of softer, more flowing forms, representing the
feminine form (in Art History). The expanse of diaphanous veils
and flat, shape-shifted structures simultaneously reveal and cloak
like the moon in its phases. In that fugitive field, the captured
sense states their interdependence to the whole, and in so doing,
explore the broadest content of “relationships,” particularly that
of ours to others, to ourselves, and to our environment and
planet.
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In considering the idea of “Taking Back the Night,” I
thought of the night sky and the poised lunar “orb” in this work
as metaphors for the realization of equality for women’s ability to
be out at night, wishing under the stars without fear of violence
or of being violated. This sense of safety is at its core a statement
of boundaries and relationships to ourselves and to our fellow
humans, expressed not as a binary gender classification or a
sense of separateness, but rather as properties contained in
each of us in various proportion and measure, and like studying
the stars, it is how we know our place in the universe. Orb & Shadow, Oil on Canvas, 1999, 26” X 72”
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