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Installation view of 10 sequential paintings mounted on  east and south wall of gallery
Painting detail of 3 weasels running together with blank speech bubbles

Rebecca Chaperon
Like a Great Black Fire
September 8 - October 15, 2011

In Rebecca Chaperon’s ten-panel painting, Like a Great Black Fire, she works with a dark, gothic aesthetic reminiscent of comics and graphic novels. Thought and speech bubbles, however, stand empty, raising questions about the place of speech and the painting as a structure that is able to produce textual meaning.

Chaperon’s subject matter ranges from ethereal and dream-like to darkly humorous; she often deals with the feminine perspective from an autobiographical point of view.

With a compulsion to create unique visual stories, Rebecca Chaperon takes the imaginative subjects of her paintings and establishes an ability to engage people by speaking to the enchantment of our human experience. Her paintings act as a means of storytelling, conveying the notion of human struggle in the 21st century. Tempered by references to the synthesized, modern world she combines the classical landscape aesthetics of the past with an aspect of ambient, self-reflective self-portraiture.