Things You Shouldn't See - Susannah Bettag Exhibition

August 22, 2008 Press Contact Wendi Norris or Raman Frey Frey Norris Gallery T: 415-346.-7812 [email protected] [email protected]

Susannah Bettag: Things You Shouldn’t See October 2 – November 2, 2008 • • •

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Will You Always Be There For Me, 40 x 30, acrylic and silver leaf on masonite, 2008

Exhibition features 12 new paintings, two videos and a video animation series. Through October 10th the artist’s work will also be on view at a juried exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center The Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA will install Drowning without You, the 1,400-vinyl doll structure in its public gallery from October to January, 2009. 20-page catalogue available, essay by Scott Shields, Chief Curator, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. – Frey Norris Gallery is pleased to present, “Things You Shouldn’t See,” a solo exhibition of 15 new pieces by San Francisco based artist Susannah Bettag. In the last two years, Bettag has been profiled in Art Ltd magazine and The Crocker Museum in Sacramento purchased the painting Now is the Time to Dance Upon the Earth for its permanent collection. Concurrent with her exhibition at our gallery, her Drowning Without You installation will debut at the Montalvo Arts Center, on display through January, 2009, and she will appear in a juried exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center through October 10th. In “Things You Shouldn’t See” Bettag creates and elaborates upon a world without men. Her paintings, animation series and videos portray colorful, sexy and mysterious women existing in a cartoon-like Xanadu of meticulous detail and strange swarming movement. Images that were previously static take on motion in these animations, such as Orison I through III. The notion of voyeurism is alluded to in the title of the show, as each subject, large and rooted in our world (many of the artist’s friends feature in paintings and videos) or small and fantastical, are seen in apparently vulnerable moments. Some confess or ruminate on the nature of secrets. Some are guarded and others are revealing. These voyeuristic teases, with occasional insinuated eroticism, ultimately leave the visitor with a playful feeling of an interrupted visual intimacy. Bettag’s women, whether jubilant friends or half-concealed line images lifted from pornography, whisper secrets, dance or enjoy the physical pleasures of life rather than hunt and kill. Other than the women, there are innumerable growths resembling fungi or plant matter, floating objects ranging in semblance from blood vessels to confetti and her ever present but now mutating character “Boo”, who makes an animated debut. Reminiscent of the luscious and dissociating vision of Lisa Yuskavage, but presented with the control of a miniaturist painter, Bettag’s art depicts a fantastical world of uneasy vicarious ecstasy. Themes touched -more-

on by artists as divergent as Marilyn Minter, with her glamorous to the point of nausea pictures of dewladen high-heeled feet, and Tracy Emmins, with her critical reevaluations and reinventions of ideas of feminism, are all alluded to in Bettag’s sophisticated examination of how 21st century women are choosing to define themselves, even as external media wage a non-stop assault to define and homogenize women from without. About the Art Twelve new paintings on masonite, some using gold and silver leaf and varying in size from two foot square to eighty inches tall, will hang spread out at eye level. These new works build on the strong graphic foundation of previous pieces. Titles like Caught By Desire and Imagine What We Desire invoke a tone of incomplete or frustrated longing. Employing subtle new metallic paints, these paintings’ smooth as glass, iridescent surfaces shine like the flattened carapaces of exotic beetles. From afar, most read as blocked out hard edged abstract boxes in bold colors, but the lure of tiny details offers a mixed bag of contrasting associations, all the elements apparently interacting in a dynamic organic frenzy. For the first time this frenzy literally springs into motion in a sequence of three animations, Orison I through III, each running vertically on large screens in the center of the gallery. Orison is a synonym for prayer, and a viewer gains empathy with the docile helplessness of the plummeting subject. In these animations, Boo, Bettag’s onomatopoeic stand-in for androgynous innocence, tumbles downward through an ocean of undulating flowers. Seeing in Shadows combines animated elements, through use of a special-effects green screen, with interviews conducted with Bettag’s friends on the subject of secrets. A wide range of enthusiasm, ambivalence and even fear, passes over faces that melt abruptly, one into another, neither fully revealing the whole secret, nor fully cloaking themselves from their own sense of vulnerability. Are You Listening or Am I Not Saying It Right? speaks to the imperfection of intimate communication, here jokingly pantomimed in the form of a dance with a friend. The artist herself starts alone and ends alone in a crowded left hand quadrant of the screen, seemingly unsure if any communication, whether intimate or essentially banal, has occurred at all. Again, ideas of voyeurism mingle with an unfulfilled hunger for a connection, a real occasion of intimacy, to genuinely transpire. Originally from Oxford, England, Susannah Bettag graduated with honors from the Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts in London. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two-year-old twins. About Frey Norris Gallery Focusing on important Bay Area artists and internationally recognized artists from Asia, Frey Norris Gallery provides one of San Francisco's most welcoming and dynamic venues for experiencing and purchasing contemporary art. Frey Norris Gallery exhibits paintings, works on paper (including drawings, pastels and watercolors), collage, sculpture, installations, video and innovative photographic media. Frey Norris Gallery 456 Geary Street San Francisco, CA 94102 T: 415.346.7812 www.freynorris.com

Gallery Hours Tuesday – Saturday 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. Sunday 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. Closed Monday

In November 2008, Frey Norris Gallery presents Harvey Dinnerstein: Underground Together. Chronicle Books is publishing the first retrospective monograph on the artist, also titled Underground Together. This volume includes an introduction by gallery owners Raman Frey and Wendi Norris, essays by award winning author Pete Hamill and art historian Gabriel P. Weisberg and personal reminiscences of a 50 year career by Dinnerstein himself. The exhibition at Frey Norris Gallery is a retrospective that will include a carefully selected group of his best work in oil paintings, watercolors, pastels and drawings, a sampling of some of the images among the 200+ reproduced in the book. -end-