Artists Corner Gallery is pleased to present Kathy Curtis Cahill’s latest series, Memories and Demons, curated by Phil Tarley. An opening reception will be held, Saturday, July 11th from 7-10 PM. The works will be on view through August 8, 2015.
Please RSVP by email: Gallery@artistscorner.us
Turbulent childhood moments form memories we try to push out of our minds; recollections we want to annihilate; pain from the past that we bury. Kathy Curtis Cahill, however, refuses to flinch from the hurt and sorrow. Instead she photographs a world filled with childhood wonder, fear, and trepidation. Delicate nuances of wistful yearnings, hope and sadness are lovingly rendered in exquisite portraits of an unspoken kindergarten life.
Cathartic, unnerving and ultimately healing, the protagonists of Cahill’s photographic mini-dramas are dolls acting out bittersweet dreams and haunting nightmares. They are wrenched from a collective history lived by children, suppressed by adults. Cahill is an artist constructing narratives with subtexts that tell our secret stories. By creating characters and masterfully manipulating her camera, she makes us feel our humanity in honest, brave, self-reflexive ways.
Blurring the line between the real and the surreal, love, abuse and trauma, Cahill’s lush pigment prints have layers of both meaning and painterly depth. She presents her work like an artist-magician, conjuring up a myriad of sophisticated image-making techniques to make elegant, visual and thematic statements that are subtle and yet become quite indelible. Embedded in elaborate mini-sets and dressed from another era, Cahill’s doll-models present characters that are timeless and enduring.
Her photographs seem powdered with fairy dust and finished with a nostalgic palette of sorrows, twinges of longing and occasional markers of the insane. Illuminated by chiaroscuro here, boldly spotlighted with cinematic intensity there, these images have a patina usually reserved for Renaissance paintings. The children’s faces come to us from another world, a world we all somehow know deep down inside our souls. Ultimately, Cahill’s luminous prints have meaning and pith – rare in a solo exhibition from an emerging artist.
-Phil Tarley, Curator
ABOUT PHIL TARLEY
PHIL TARLEY is a Fellow of The American Film Institute and an artist member of The Los Angeles Art Association and The California LGBT Arts Alliance. As an art and pop culture critic, he regularly posts stories on The WOW Report; writes about contemporary art and photography for Fabrik Magazine and Art Week LA. Tarley cultivates and promotes artists and helps galleries with their curatorial, exhibition catalogs and press related needs. He curates exhibitions of contemporary photography at the Artists Corner Gallery and Bookmaking, in Hollywood, California. Tarley is also a critical essayist for Katharine T. Carter & Associates, an art advisory service that conducts studio visits, helps artists focus their careers and obtains museum exhibitions. Tarley’s series of political and ethnographic videos is housed in the permanent collection of the New York Public Library and has screened in film festivals and museums like American Film Institute and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Tarley’s writing and photography have also appeared in the LA Times, the LA Weekly, Adventure Journal, the Advocate, Frontiers, Adult Video News, Genre and Instinct Magazine.
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