Siren screams
Sally Hart's Siren Screams is an exhibition of nine paintings with a folio of pencil drawings, held in the intimate and casual venue of Café Europe. Cafe Europe has been operating as an exhibition space for over a year. The works hang higher than in a normal gallery space and the booths inhibit close inspection, but they also provide a personal space from which to view the art works. Siren Screams suits the space well, consciously usurping the role of conventional coffee-house decoration. The small number of equally sized works are dominated by an iconic aesthetic using predominantly black, white and primary colours. This creates a unified visual discourse which in turn facilitates a more complex and subtle flow of ideas.
The works are based upon the central symbol of the mermaid which serves as a visual metaphor for the feminine. Hart's exploration of the mermaid figure (and the feminine) resides in the issue of representation where representation is a composite involving the structural nature of the mermaid symbol itself and its aesthetic encoding in a stylistic medium and context. These two components (like the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic) work to situate the mermaid/metaphoric feminine in a representational discourse while leaving generated meaning multiple, an open-ended play of the various structural and aesthetic signifieds.
Hart's images contain only one or two figures, presented in a two dimensional format with bold black outlines. It is a curious blend of the naive and high modernism, styles which are both effectively dependent on the concept of the primitive. Hart's combination of naive faces with modernist figures offers an effective representational strategy for the mermaid symbol.
In naive works, such as Siren Screams II