Shadow Shot Sunday

This week's Pagan Sphinx Shadow Shot Sunday entry features my photographs of the works of Robert Taplin taken at an exhibition of his work at Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams.
 Everything Real Is Imagined (After Dante) consists of nine sculptures or dioramas (a sampling of which are depicted here, each referencing scenes from Dante's Inferno as modern allegories of political strife. Taplin's story begins as Dante's does with the uncertain sense of whether or not we are in a dream or reality

Everything Real Is Imagined is part of the larger group exhibition These Days: Elegies for Modern Times 

From ArtsBoston:

George Bolster, Chris Doyle, Micah Silver, Robert Taplin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Pawel Wojtasik In 1967 Jackson Browne penned the lyric: "These days I seem to think about/ How all the changes came about my ways/ And I wonder if I'll see another highway." As the world shifts around us in ways that are profoundly disorienting, Browne's song resonates. Bringing together six artists whose work is infused with that lyric's sense of wonderment, and with the poetic and musical tradition of the elegy, These Days: Elegies for Modern Times responds to today's changing world with installations, photographs, painting, sculpture and video. The exhibition is at once an extended lamentation, but also full of a revelatory sense of possibility and hope. Opening Saturday, April 4, 2009 the exhibition features work by George Bolster, Chris Doyle, Micah Silver, Robert Taplin, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Pawel Wojtasik. Two of the artists will exhibit works from the past year while the other four have created new installations specifically for the exhibition including two room-size works: a 12' tall, 36' diameter video panorama and a full-size chapel-like environment.

 Robert Taplin 

Everything Real Is Imagined (After Dante)

(click on photos to enlarge to a better viewing size)

 

Thus My Soul Which Was Still In Flight 

(The Dark Wood)

 

Across The Dark Waters 

(The River Acheron)

 

Shadow Shot Sunday is hosted by Tracy at Hey, Harriet in Brisbane

Seven Deadly Sins: Envy

“Envy is more implacable than hatred.”
- de La Rochefoucauld

Seeing as I'm on this Dante kick, I thought I'd post about Envy (also know as indivia in Italian)from that perspective, with perhaps a few other random things thrown in. We'll see where this goes.

According to Dante Alighieri's tour in The Divine Comedy's Inferno installment, there are nine concentric circles of Hell. Each circle representing a gradual increase in wickedness. Each circle's sinners are punished in a manner fitting to their crime.

Dante defined Envy as "love of one's own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs."

The envious end up in the second tier. Their punishment is severe: they have their eyes sewn shut with wire, because they have gained pleasure from seeing those they envy brought down.

photo by Pagan Sphinx

Marcel Jean Specter of the Gardenia
MoMA

(The choice of this sculpture is purely my own connection, as I have not been able to find any information about it and its title certainly does not give any indication of its meaning.)

Gustave Doré

Envious Penitents

And no discussion of Dante's Divine Comedy is complete without a mention of William Blake, whose illustrations for the work he is well known for

Dante and Statius Sleeping,Virgil-Watching


Lastly, I came upon this photograph of a sculpture of Blake by James. S. Deville, after uploading the photograph above, that reminded me of the punishment for Envy, in Dante's Inferno.

Join Kay for The Seven Deadly Sins Meme.

Thanks, Kay, this has been very interesting and fun for me; now smitten with both Blake and Dante. Yeah, I know. Once a nerd, always a nerd! ;-)

Follow-up to The Friday Evening Nudes

The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil

Thanks to the curiosity of Linda and Mojo, I was smitten to do a little research on the Ary Scheffer painting I posted last night on the Friday Evening Nudes.

Being a lazy blogger, I didn't even dig far enough to get the title, which would have been instructional in and of itself.

Interesting that I should post this painting pretty much on the heels of The Seven Deadly Sins meme as it depicts Dante's lovers from The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto V. And I didn't even know the title until I started to do a little research!

Dante then asks particularly to speak to two sinners who are together, and Virgil tells him to call them to him in the name of love. They come, and one thanks Dante for his pity and wishes him peace, and she then tells their story. She reveals first that a lower circle of Hell waits for the man who murdered them. With bowed head, Dante tells Virgil he is thinking of the "sweet thoughts and desires" that brought the lovers to this place. Calling Francesca by name, he asks her to explain how she and her lover were lured into sin...read more here from Canto V

As for the Brulov painting entitled Virsavia by Karl Brulov (or Brullov as I've also found it spelled), all I could find was the alternate title Bathsheba, wife David of the Hebrew bible. I'm assuming the rapt admirer is a slave attending Bathsheba in her bath. WP thinks the slave may be female. What do you think?


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