Zarinah's work lines the walls in a curation following a story of her personal journey in visual form. All 9 works are oil on wood panels. Zarinah begins with a surrealist Kahlo inspired wing song, we witness her open skeleton and heart flying toward our first encounter with the gatekeeper, a woman wrapped in ornate cloth snaking the face of the image and masking her mouth. Thirdly we see a young girl, sitting on top of the alligators in what reminds me of the swampy U.S. South. The title: She just wanted to chase the butterfly, shows the young girl's focus so intently on the magic of the effervescent bold red flying creature, while sitting so intimately close to a source of danger we can notice only when seeing the bold yellow eye of the alligator underneath her diapered bum. I should not forget to mention a red snake coming directly toward her in a center pathway in the forrest. The trees were bare and tall.. the tops not visible in frame. Once could imagine the height to be infinite, or similar to the red woods. Thin ghostly white trunks in endless amounts in the young girl's forest, as she sits in the river on the alligator head.
Next we transition to the voiceless multicolored neon face with scratched out mouth. Immersed in a burgundy purple puddle or waveless ocean of deep emotion, we see the reflection of this face with its teeth, nose and ears defined where absent in the dominant original... suggesting the outside forces have scraped these objects away. The visual richness of color reminded me of emma amos in abstract futurist form, with a neutral gender. The symbolism and ideas definitely struct me as feminizing socialization. But perhaps, the silence and sheltered faces are felt differently but are still present throughout a variety of bodies.
We see another gatekeeper. Each is replicated with the same color scheme, action and composition with slight variation of tone, texture and scale of individual spaces/objects. Next we see a woman holding a snake like vine across her neck, similar in shape to the masking scarf of the gatekeeper. This snaking vine has two bold dark red bulbs ready to bloom.
My additional favorites to highlight are the woman standing in the ocean with the waves, defiantly looking into the distance in her corner. She is beautiful and brown, with very defined cheek bones and African facial features. She is wearing a white tank top with her hips and shoulders in the breaking water of the waves. She is defining the ocean, like Yemanja in baby blue and white.
Lastly, Zarinah concludes with a softer ocean at dusk, with sands and shores and the sun at the horizon. She carves a silhouette of a body and profile face... almost like an invisible presence or ghost with the sun in her throat.
I shed a tear from the evocative beauty in her imagery.
Congratulations dear friend.
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