Rebecca Farr descends into the philosophic, mythic and psychological ideas of cave dwelling for her first solo exhibition at Five Car Garage. Leading with studies of gender, body and spirituality/morality, she paints her way through one of the oldest symbols of home, the cave. Plato’s revelation of the body mind/split that can be found in ‘The Allegory of the Cave’, along with Persephone’s repeated journeys to the underworld for renewal are her sources of inspiration. They wrestle awkwardly together as opposing sources for her personal explorations of transformation, renewal and the presence of the body.
Rebecca Farr paints large scale classically narrative oil paintings with an impressionist influence. Figures slip out of modern time and find themselves encircling campfires within shadowy landscapes, reminiscent of imagery from the 19th Century - also an era of sweeping social change. Old fashioned farmers, nuns, princes and soldiers appear, echo-ing the heavy roles played in her lineage through history. Ancestors seeking wholeness after centuries of control, exile and domination yearn for a new way of being.
In Rebecca’s feminist gaze of the cave, the dark soil is not a prison of sensory delusion but a journey of willing sacrifice in order to be more whole. Farr’s cave is a dark womb holding the awe, sorrow and compassion of our collective shadows. In this space everything is within the bounds, and the paradoxes fly, the dual and trine aspects of self, the knowledge of the underworld does not come from reason, but sharing realities. Empathetic intuition and truths flourish in the fertile darkness birthing new consciousness.
The feminine transforms through surrendering, by being confronted with a larger truth that shakes her down and dismembers old patterns that don’t work any more; the loose gestural paint transforms itself along with the artist. And Rebecca Farr returns, back out into the world sharing her series of seven Cave paintings, trans-spatially holding aspects of light and dark, male and female, in and out.