Bea Scaccia: Wrap Yourself in This Skin
Past Exhibitions exhibition
Overview
The series of paintings Wrap Yourself in This Skin, by New York-based Italian American painter Bea Scaccia, is thematically based on the French fairytale, Donkey Skin, and provides an atmospheric, immersive setting for paintings that capture her ongoing exploration of feminine splendour, psychology, and mystery that gives way to subversive imagination.
Rendered in a dark colour palette and enhanced with an impressive utilisation of chiaroscuro, she reworks elements that collectively give rise to illusions of societal beauty constructs, resulting in over-the-top compositions bursting with fur, jewels, wigs, and fabrics that signify deeper, psychological themes. Pearls and hair clips become infestations; what was seen as well-ordered in the sensual hairdos of the Baroque and Rococo periods become unavoidably disturbing.
“In my work, I have been investigating the connection between beauty and monstrosity—how easily something beautiful can turn monstrous, disturbing, mysterious, simply because of placement, number, size, light. This possibility of turning reassuring symbols into something dark is contained in our psychology as human beings; it is behind the uncanny that so much has attracted us,” writes Scaccia.
She continues “We are masks, and masks are the only honest face we can have. We are forever engaged in the act of covering up, hiding, performing, parading, embellishing, metamorphosing, and shapeshifting. Myths and fairytales are filled with women metamorphosing into animals, becoming unrecognisable; usually to escape a difficult situation and to find a new identity. In most cultures, the woman was a symbolic outsider, she was ‘the other’ and ‘a marriage demanded an intimate involvement in a world never quite her own’—hence the animals, the hiding, the metamorphosis––hence Donkey Skin.”
Installation Views
Works
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