Preview: Marci Washington in SF (4.9)

Another DD favorite Marci Washington opens her next solo at Rena Bransten Gallery in SF next weekend.

Marci Washington’s lush paintings in DARK MIRROR work on several levels to build suspicion and to enhance an ominous sense of discomfort and crisis in viewers. She achieves this by depicting ghosts, haunted houses, vampires, dismembered limbs, bloody scenery, and an assortment of sallow young people who serve as metaphors for serious social ills. Washington’s model for a doomed society was Edwardian England whose rigid social norms and repressive imperialist vision sparked its decline – a situation Washington feels is mirrored by a present-day America stricken by the same ideological “curse”. Her Edwardian characters and romance novel format allow Washington “to construct an allegorical tale capable of challenging the simplistic cultural narrative of our own time in order to reveal a much darker tale of moral decline, spiritual crisis, and rampant anxiety, all lurking beneath the siren song of material desire fueling the “progress” of a capitalist society in decline.”

Marci Washington
Dark Mirror
April 9th – May 16th
Opening Reception- Thur. April 9th 5:30 – 7:30
Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA