I’ve always loved tableaus, scenes that represent a moment in time. I loved making dioramas for school as a kid, and I still love looking at prehistoric dioramas in natural history museums. (Questions of historical accuracy aside, of course!)
One of those grade school dioramas — and I SO wish I had a photo of this to share — was a “solar house” that I made for the “ecology” unit in social studies. I painted a little cardboard box yellow, taped plastic wrap solar panels on top of its roof (so severely un-environmental!), and cut out tiny little people forever preserved in the act of recycling trash and reusing water.
There is an inherent sense of enigma to these still moments. We get to peek into a sliver of time paused in action. What came before? What happens next? We’ll never know, and I love wondering.
“The Maneless Male Lions of Tsavo” by Jeffrey Jung is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0/cropped from original/source: http://bit.ly/1jZXMch)
There are a lot of these tableaus, these moments of frozen mystery, in my work. In a piece I created in 2013, I Am Beating All My Wings, I myself wondered what was happening. The hummingbird, furiously beating its wings seems surrounded by an impenetrable earthen wall of immovable cells. Is the bird trapped? Will it push through? The answer to that question fluctuated as I worked on the piece and a year later, I still do not know. I think that’s what I love about it, though, the mystery of what happens next and whether it is a dark piece about being trapped or a more hopeful piece about pushing through. To me, it is both.
I Am Beating All My Wings, Amy Ventura ©2013
I Am Beating All My Wings, 2013 (burned wood engraving finished with milk paint, 10″x10″, $425.) This work is currently showing at the Southern Illinois Artisans Center. Please call the shop at (618) 629-2220 to purchase the piece and have it shipped. Or, shoot me an email at admin [at] amyventura [dot] com and I’ll talk to the museum directly to act as a go-between.
Featured image at top of this post: “A Model Showing Ancient Cavemen Stands Inside the National Museum of Mongoalian Histroy” by Lance Cpl. Nathan McCord / source
Tsavo lion image: source
I create burned wood engravings that combine my love of the textures and patterns found in nature with a deep interest in the unconscious world of dreams, symbols and mythic folklore. 