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Claire Oliver Gallery

Claire Oliver Gallery
Address
West 26th Street Nº 513, 10001, New York, United States
Phone
(212) 929-5949
Email
Info@ClaireOliver.com

Claire Oliver’s commitment to remaining in the primary market, solely promoting emerging and mid-career artists, has allowed for intensive focus, development and insight, which has led to significant advancement in the gallery artists’ careers. As an outcome of this practice, the gallery’s artists have been included in The Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial, and have received prestigious fellowships including the Fulbright, Guggenheim, US Artist and NEA. Claire Oliver Gallery artists are included in the permanent collections of many important museums including The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Tate Modern, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The State Hermitage Museum and MoMA, New York. In addition to maintaining an ambitious exhibition schedule, Claire Oliver Gallery collaborates with not-for-profits to realize ambitious public art projects.

Claire Oliver Gallery was established to promote an agenda emphasizing the physicality of the artistic process regardless of medium. Encouraging artists to experiment without restraint has given the gallery a singular vision displayed through a diverse range of genre, all of which balance the conceptual with the inventive. This freedom from preconceived expectations has resulted in the gallery’s unique aesthetic significance within the international contemporary art market.

Claire Oliver Gallery is committed to fostering the careers of its represented artists by building institutional and critical awareness, and through the conscientious development of their commercial market. The gallery’s continued determination to showing works that convey their conceptual underpinnings while remaining smart, well informed and beautiful has earned the respect of curators and collectors worldwide.

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  • 00:00
Artist
Carla Gannis
Title
Jezebel
Year
2006
Duration
7 min 33 s
Format & Technical

Five channel installation, HD video, Colour, Sound

CreditsRead more
  • Christina Tarbell
  • Jimi Billingsley, Alexis Callender and Teddy Maki

Carla Gannis’s 5 screen video installation is part cultural anthropology and part dream-scape surrealism. Her “Jezebels” are set within fragmentary layered interiors, where past and present worlds collide. Ornate rooms, church sanctuaries and institutional green hospitals are “wallpapered” with urban graffiti and detritus. Jezebel is a woman caught between realities, existing in the future, present and past simultaneously.

Approaching the work as a three dimensional moving painting, Gannis’ Jezebel intimates the mythology, history, and stereotypes that shape and define femininity within our collective unconscious. This icon is not one woman, but many, ranging from a villain to a non-conformist to a superwoman of human empowerment. The color red as a signifier of lust, sexuality, wantonness, as well as revolution, anger, and courage; we see this color wrapping not only the figure but her words.

Gannis, a native of the Southern United States, was first inspired by the 1938 film in which an outspoken 19th century Southern belle — played by the actress Bette Davis — is ostracized and labeled a “Jezebel” for a wearing a red dress, instead of a “virginal” white dress, to a formal ball. From this character, the artist researched the more universal interpretations and contradictions that surround the avatar Jezebel.

In a reference to cinema and painting, Gannis provides five mise en scènes that give context to Jezebel’s historic and cultural currency. She has collected numerous texts and woven them together into visual and textual personifications. Her five representations include:
Jezebel CHRISTINA: the woman who actually plays Jezebel in this work, as herself, a real woman, who contends with personal identity politics

Jezebel BETTE: where monologue is taken from the original “coquettish” Bette Davis performance

Jezebel THE PREACHER : based on the age-old representation of Jezebel as a pagan temptress (contemporary religious leaders still refer to “Jezebel” as an entity that is threatening in these texts)

Jezebel THE RAP: where misogynistic lyrics and a sexualized Jezebel are inverted, and where language in regards to female sublimation explains much of Jezebel’s villainy

Jezebel PIAF: based on singer Edith Piaf’s loving tribute to Jezebel, including texts that address darkness and religious antithesis

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Related professionals

Carla Gannis
Artist

Carla Gannis