Conversation 5: Jamie Vasta & Nicholas Pye + Sheila Pye

Curator, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. July - September 2009

Conversations is in an ongoing series of two-person exhibitions that explore the relationship between an artist from the Bay Area and an artist from another point on the globe. The intent of this series is two-fold: on an intimate level it allows for a closer look at the production of two individual artists, while it also informs an expansive perspective of how artists from our region relate to an international contemporary art dialogue.

Jamie Vasta is renowned for her exuberant paintings depicting dark and dramatic narratives. Vasta “paints” with glitter, and the result is a surface that is entirely beautiful and enticing – drawing the view closer, in spite of the often violent subject matter. For this new body of work Vasta has created three large-scale works that will reside both on the floor and on the walls of the SFAC Gallery. Her subject matter revolves around the mythical stories of Sirens luring sailors to their death. With charged with potent sexual and psychological content, Sirens pushes the viewer to reflect on gender-based power dynamics, as well as the very human tendency to be seduced by what is desirable yet dangerous.

Nicholas Pye & Sheila Pye have been making films and photographs together, in addition to their individual practices, since 2001. In 2004 the Pyes created the short film, The Paper Wall, which became the first in what was to be a trilogy of works about relationships. The Paper Wall is about a brother and sister expressing their desires silently to each other through a wall. The second film, A Life of Errors, produced in 2006, is about a battle of wills and the testing of various relationship breaking points. Loudly, Death Unties, produced in 2008, is the final film in the trilogy. The film, ultimately, is about the death of a lover. In Irish folklore, the wail of a Banshee announces the inevitable death of someone. In Loudly, Death Unties a Banshee arrives, in the form of a little girl, and through a series of uncanny circumstances, she forces one lover to say goodbye to the other. This film is making its Bay Area premiere and has received rave reviews in Artforum, Art in America and Art News.