Press Release – for Immediate Release

A walk through any major art museum reveals that people experience the world’s cultural heritage through the power of images. Our spiritual life is expressed by religious icons, our humanity through portraiture and myth, and the world of ordinary, everyday life, through genre painting. The greatest artists placed powerful perceptual metaphors in our mind’s eye; images that define history, transfix our assumptions about the past and create the portal through which we envision the future. The paintings in this exhibition address themes known to us from the canon of art history – the temporal nature of the world, the fragility of life, the senselessness of cruelty, suffering and death. Ed Rath expresses these themes through personification and parody. His animated trees bypass the idealization of the human figure and express raw emotion by aping human poses. Branches become hair and arms, bark – skin, knots and holes – eyes. These long-suffering soulless beings bear their crosses in silence while they enact the great narratives of art history. Works inspired by sacred narratives include “Madonna and Child” and “Pieta.”