Comora Tolliver

For a long time I've been a huge fan of Comora Tolliver's work. If you don't know about it you should. I've discussed it a bit in the last chapter of The Ecological Thought. I saw Pod and was transfixed by her covering of the installation space with mylar, down which she dripped paint. It was a very uncanny experience being inside this oozing mirror. The only things I can compare it to are extremely powerful sheets of guitar such as the ones by the inimitable Kevin Shields on Experimental Audio Research's Beyond the Pale. Pod is "about" preserving seeds in seed banks...

Her new work is just incredible. Look at the one called Death Eater. (It sounds like a blood drinking goddness of Vajrayana Buddhism...) I'm not sure yet but there's something Medusa-like in the “floating hair” (Coleridge) that wafts around the bird like a material halo. You are forced into intimacy with this life form, no doubt a strange stranger...

If you mouse over the pictures, you will see details.

Mystic Chicken must be a mascot for speculative realism...It goes beyond even Bacon's chicken/human eye/bandage in the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

There are other paintings here which I'll post on soon.