• MAUREEN ST. VINCENT: RIPPLE HISS

    November 10 - December 22. 2022

  • Embedded within Maureen St. Vincent’s painted and shaped frames, apertures open onto worlds of imagery at once surreal and familiar. The ovular as a guiding, compositional form here isn’t incidental: executed in arcadian, textured pastels; soft fleshy pinks; and saturated swaths of vibrant hues, her drawings invoke the bodily while sliding over into interior visions, intense viscerality, sensuous symbolism, and unruly fantasies. 

     

    St. Vincent calls these works “naughty.” The artist traffics in promiscuous slippages—between image and frame, interior and exterior, figure and ground, corporeal or organic materiality and phantasmatic realms. In this relay between registers, figure and form are co-extensive, exerting influence upon one another.

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  • Take Biancabella and the Snake, for instance, where the configuration of a frame defined by the bilateral symmetry of its...

    Take Biancabella and the Snake, for instance, where the configuration of a frame defined by the bilateral symmetry of its bulbous, airfoil halves invites repetition within the image field: a Rorschach-like doubling that never yields an exact mirror image. Separated from the solid blue frame by a thin, jagged, electric pink line, the enclosed image is twofold and further reduces into twos from there. First, there are two egg-like zones, connected at the midline by a vaginal slit; then, there is the dichotomous separation of pictorial space—one part fleshy-pink tissue, the other, an extension of the frame’s Turkish blue, that bleeds into the drawing. Within each scene, set on a bed of textured grass, two thick-bodied, limbless and unarticulated ringed masses rise up against a yellow ground. 

  • In Mom’s Jewels, chained grapes and a sinuous serpent similarly emerge from a radiating, gaping orifice, against a dense purple...

    In Mom’s Jewels, chained grapes and a sinuous serpent similarly emerge from a radiating, gaping orifice, against a dense purple and crimson reticular ground. Embodying Biblical allegories of chaos, evil, and the fall through temptation, the serpent also conjures fluidity, rebirth, healing, and self-regeneration. Held in tension, too, is the push and pull between the serpent as phallus, and the generative representation of orifices in St. Vincent’s work.

  • In Sister Slip, for instance, such breaches in the picture plane, construed as vaginal slits or mouths, spew elegant, leg-like...

    In Sister Slip, for instance, such breaches in the picture plane, construed as vaginal slits or mouths, spew elegant, leg-like perches upon which stand a pair of snails, caught in viscous embrace. Viscid and tensile forms—rendered animate in these compositions where all elements are endowed with dynamic vitality—become yet another image repertoire to draw from in St. Vincent’s formal and symbolic dictionary. 

     

    As cast-aside surrealisms reemerge from the historical shadows, and visions of the occult, the transcendental, and the fantastic come into focus, Maureen St. Vincent’s work offers vistas into an internal experience of female corporeality and symbolic sexual imaginary dense with rapturous life-forms and psychic tension that center visual pleasure as a boundless experience. – Rachel Valinsky.

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  • WORKS ON VIEW

    • Pastel drawing featuring a slender onyx serpent winding through a landscape of puffy pink or yellow biomorphs, its body cleaved improbably by a vulva hovering in the center. The navy blue and symmetrical curved custom artist’s frame with pink outline is reminiscent of bodily forms that are distinctly female.
      Maureen St. Vincent
      Biancabella and the Snake, 2022
      Soft pastel on paper with artist frame
      32 x 38 x 3/4 in
      81.3 x 96.5 x 1.9 cm
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    • Pastel drawing showing two bunches of snail-infested grapes for ovaries. The dark maroon and symmetrical curved custom artist’s frame is reminiscent of bodily forms that are distinctly female.
      Maureen St. Vincent
      Cleopatra's Ovaries, 2022
      Soft pastel on paper with artist frame
      40 x 33 x 3/4 in
      101.6 x 83.8 x 1.9 cm
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    • Pastel drawing showing twisted and intertwined umbilical cords. The ivory hued and symmetrical curved custom artist’s frame with bright orange outline is reminiscent of bodily forms that are distinctly female.
      Maureen St. Vincent
      Delayed Clamp, 2022
      Soft pastel on paper with artist frame
      24 x 18 x 3/4 in
      61 x 45.7 x 1.9 cm
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    • Pastel drawing showing pearly grapes resembling ovaries in a swollen interior rectangle of the frame that recalls a vintage television’s convex screen. The violet hued and symmetrical curved custom artist’s frame with bright orange outline is reminiscent of bodily forms that are distinctly female.
      Maureen St. Vincent
      Mom's Jewels, 2022
      Soft pastel on paper with artist frame
      23 x 22 x 3/4 in
      58.4 x 55.9 x 1.9 cm
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    • Pastel drawing showing braided umbilical cord penetrating a six- fingered shell while its twin’s upper lobe bears a butterfly-shaped hole. The light blue and symmetrical curved custom artist’s frame with bright orange outline is reminiscent of bodily forms that are distinctly female.
      Maureen St. Vincent
      Price's Daughters, 2022
      Soft pastel on paper with artist frame
      37 x 44 x 3/4 in
      94 x 111.8 x 1.9 cm
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    • Pastel drawing featuring two interacting snails equipped with fluidly looped thighs are surrounded by abstract elements in orange, white and navy-blue colors. The persimmon hued and symmetrical curved custom artist’s frame is reminiscent of bodily forms that are distinctly female.
      Maureen St. Vincent
      Sister Slip, 2022
      Soft pastel on paper with artist frame
      45 x 34 x 3/4 in
      114.3 x 86.4 x 1.9 cm
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  • ABOUT THE ARTIST

    Maureen St. Vincent (b. San Luis Obispo, CA) currently lives and works in Oakland, CA. She received her BA from San Francisco State University and graduated from Hunter College’s MFA program with an emphasis in painting. St. Vincent’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles and Zoe Fisher Projects, New York City. She has also been included in group exhibitions at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Regina Rex, New York, NY; and San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in multiple publications including ArtMaze Magazine, Artnet News, Brooklyn Rail, and Art of Choice.