End Show at Tangent Gallery

I had the opportunity to display one of my paintings at Tangent Gallery's final show, appropriately titled the "End Show".  While it would have been fun to explore the theme of “the end” in a way that was a little less, shall we say, overt, my painting Murder Scene 1: Invasion of the Bee Girls, which I had just put final touches on, was too good a fit not to be my submission for the show.  This piece garnered mixed reactions at the opening reception, and by and large seemed to make people uncomfortable.  So it wasn’t an hour into the reception when I took to disclosing the story of the depicted couple to anyone unlucky enough to have been caught gawking at the piece.  After explaining to the stranger that the two were secondary characters from a B movie, the story that followed went something like this:

So this is a husband and wife.  They’ve been married long enough that they have deep, embedded resentments towards each other that materialize in their sex life.  The husband constantly tells the wife how generally awful and unattractive she is, while also trying to get sex from her. The wife will likewise verbally emasculate the man while blatantly withholding sex.  This tension between them builds throughout the movie until the woman is turned into a “bee girl” seductress by an evil bee-lady scientist.  The way the bee girls work is they seduce the man into sex, and then in the final throws of passion, suck the life-force-energy out of him, killing him.

…And it was usually right about here that the person would politely act like they knew just what I was getting at, thank me, and then excuse themselves.  I like to think that these people related to the story just a little too well, rather than being completely confounded by it, but I don't know.  Likely they were simply not that interested to begin with. I realized later that my eye had an involuntarily twinkle as I told and retold this story, and that certainly couldn’t have helped.

Other works on display that night ranged from a ceramic sculpture of a pizza topped with pepperoni and a dismembered piglet, a line of what looked to me like aging pubic hair, Dia de los Muertos motifs, and a very Disney-esque painting of a man taking a picture of himself with his I-phone while giving a thumbs-up in front of a mushroom cloud.  The curators of Tangent Gallery put together a terrific final show, and I will forever be in debt for the opportunities and memories they gave me.  Adieu.