 |
Bird
in a Gilded Cage (1999)
and Gateway to Your Soul (1998) depict female heads covered with
bright, colorful jewels. In Bird in a Gilded Cage, a woman's beautiful
beaded and jeweled head is placed inside a cage decorated on one side with
a garland of red flowers. Her left eye is a flower and her righ a mirror.
She has grapes wrapped around her neck and her mouth is sealed with a butterfly.
The woman is pure ostentation, literally all glitz, and she is trapped.
Murray describes the woman as "always pretty, always thin and always
quiet". |
| In
Gateway to your Soul, a beaded head hangs from a
bird stand. The eyes are replaced with mirrors, allowing the viewer to
see his or her own eyes. The bodiless woman suggests enchantment and seduction,
but there is, at the same time, something menacing about her. Her collar
is reminiscent of a spiderweb adn the beads around her mirror-eyes suggest
a mansk.Carl Jung's "dark side of the self" is hinted at here;
it is "the most dangerous thing of all, precisedly because the self
is the greatest power in the psyche" read
more...
Graziella
Marchicelli, Ph.D.
Fine Arts Curator, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art |
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