Show combines sexualized images with religious epiphanies

By AGNIESZKA MATEJKO

Sometimes it's wonderful when things don't work out as planned. When a schedule gets mixed up or when a train doesn't run on time you often find yourself left with time on your hands-time that somehow seems a little bit out of the ordinary. That's what happened when I met Tessa Nunn to speak about her recent show of paintings, The Beginning Process-since the gallery attendant didn't show up, the two of us sat down on the curb of a downtown street waiting for the gallery to open. As Nunn spoke about her art, the hectic downtown clamour seemed to fade into silence and I began to feel like an Inuit child sitting on a stone, listening to the stories told by an elder. Nunn has many stories to tell, all of which she weaves into her painting like the threads of a tapestry. Just like Inuit fables, her stories are not all joy and light; instead, they speak about the tragedies, erotic excesses, pleasures and small ecstasies we meet on life's journey with unflinching honesty and a splash of magic.

Nunn began her series of paintings in New York just around September 11, 2001. The New York Academy of Art, where she studied, was located only four blocks from the fallen towers. She was there when the sirens began to ring and when acrid smoke filled the air -smoke that she breathed for weeks after the event. Nunn went to New York City as a kind of quest following the painful process of a divorce. ("I as a kind of self-exploration , to be alone among millions of people," she say's.) But after witnessing the horrific events that unfolded around her, she had to ask herself "What is between my pain, which is so personal, and other people's pain-universal pain?" An answer to this open question can be found in some of her paintings.

IN THE RIDDLE OF THE PSYCHE, the viewer's eye is led through the winding path of the composition as if through a storyline. At the forefront is a naked woman crouching like a small child searching for pebbles on a beach, but finding only an ashtray with a roach on a wooden floor of a New York apartment. The woman is beautiful, erotic and yet so childlike that any thoughts of sexuality are disturbingly tinged with pornography. "I was sexualized as a child," says Nunn. "Girls are nurtured in an odd way [in our culture]; they are sexualized at a very young age. lf you are sexualized without knowing what sexuality is, you lose your sense of self."

As your eye moves along the path of the composition, you spot, looming behind the head of the child-woman, an adult world of ritualized eroticism. Two life-sized Hindu deities, father/mother figures, are copulating with alacrity, their union guarded by four goddesses. Their act is stripped of all romantic niceties, but this potentially brutal image is far from pomography; instead, it's a ritualized act that is both creative and distructive. "Once you get past what happened as a woman, as a child,) Nunn says, "then you move to that state of enlightenment, then you move to the otherside." Finally, behind those turbulent images, the eye comes to rest against the soothing light falling through the apartment window. And so, the eye's final stop is an image of calm, acceptance and religious transcendence.

THIS PAINTING, like others in the show, is a story of life's passage. It's Nunn's own story, but it could be the story of any woman, a contemporary city dweller or a Hindu peasant girl 1,000 years ago. Nunn's paintings are also spiritual fables that draw on the religious traditions from around the world -traditions that came to life for her during her stay in New York. "New York is an inhumane, concrete, machine-like space," she says. "The only place I could be myself was when I entered sacred spaces of any sort." In her paintings, the mythical figures and religious icons she saw all over New York came down from the walls of the temples, straight into the midst of contemporary New York life. Nunn stands amidst it all, depicted in self-portraits, part woman, part child and part mythical figure, as if her own story and the myths and dreams of people around the world had become her own.

THE BEGINNING PROCESS. Works by Tessa Nunn