Anastasia Pelias
Embodied XVI
2023

Name: Embodied XVI
Brand: Anastasia Pelias
Price: 5950 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Pelias expounds on her new works . . . In this group of oil paintings on canvas, I am inspired and informed by my personal history and collective lived experience, as well as the experiences of women from mythologies, fairy tales, ancient and contemporary poetry, and feminist writings. I pay homage to these heroic warriors, healers, mothers, goddesses, lovers, leaders and poets, all of whom manifest the feminine on their own terms. The group of sumi ink and charcoal works on paper, titled “Embodied”, range in size from small to over life size. They are intimate, gestural, and immediate works concerned with mark-making both hard and soft, muscular and nuanced. The resulting images are suggestive of the vulnerability and strength of the internal and external female body. ViVa, a monumental polyurea and aluminum sculpture, is an abstract archetypal form that encompasses the essence of the female. The sculpture lives in the present while acknowledging the near and distant past. ViVa expresses the energy, power, and potentiality of women; and also poses the question: What defines the feminine? Artist and writer Lee Deigaard explicates . . . Works reference plunging, being consumed, endurance, transcendence, and fury. They call to the body and compel the archetype as being visceral and real. Pelias’ abstractions draw from and within the body and the movements of her own in their making. Her height and span of arms and hands, her language of marks and process from intimate to heroic convey a central journey from physical tribulation and trial, in myths and stories invoking risk of death or actual death, to a transcendence. How the female body, for too long, considered almost by definition to be domestic, instead spans the millennia in collective memory and atavistic recall, therefore traveling (and holding) time and space. Trauma is intergenerational and writes itself within our DNA but also links us to the powerful figures who came before us. The archetypes here are not vague or generalized but embodied and within them derive healing and power. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ANASTASIA PELIAS was born in New Orleans, LA to Greek parents. She received a BFA from Newcomb College of Tulane University, New Orleans (1981), and an MFA from the University of New Orleans (1996). She is a painter and sculptor who creates site-specific installations in which she examines personal history, familial relationships, and human ritual. She draws from her Greek and New Orleanian heritage to infuse her work with her preferred subjects: love, sex, death, destiny, and the female experience. Pelias’ work invites viewers to immerse themselves in the expression of her story, but also to examine that story introspectively. Pelias has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums nationwide, including the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; Pensacola Museum of Art; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge and most recently Prospect.5 New Orleans. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; Newcomb Museum, New Orleans; Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama, and in private and public collections around the world. Pelias’ work has been featured in notable exhibitions including The Whole Drum Will Sound: Women in Southern Abstraction at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2018, and Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana at Newcomb Art Museum in 2019 and at the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2020. In 2018, Pelias was commissioned by the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX to to make a site-specific sculpture and painting installation. In 2020, Pelias was commissioned by the Domain Companies to create a 54 foot mural at the Odeon Building in New Orleans. In 2020 she was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Residency. Pelias was a selected artist in the Prospect.5 Triennial, 2021-22, where she exhibited a site-specific multi sensory installation involving sculpture, a painted landscape, sound and scent.

Creator:

Anastasia Pelias (American)

Creation Year:

2023

Dimensions:

Height: 44.5 in (113.03 cm)Width: 29.5 in (74.93 cm)

Medium:

Charcoal,Sumi Ink,Paper

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

21st Century