Visual Aid's Remix Exhibition / Gallery Walk

Mixed media works by Jenny Kahn are featured in this solo exhibition. Many are collaged oil paintings---narratives that include painted figures densely layered with pop culture imagery pulled from vintage comic books, movie stills, and photographs, intertwined with elaborately drawn lines and repeated printed forms that create textural patterns.

Kahn's Zeus and Ganymede (remix), depicts the god Zeus who, having fallen in love with the young and handsome Ganymede, transforms himself into an eagle and carries Ganymede back to Mount Olympus to be his lover. A symbol of homoeroticism, Ganymede has been referenced by writers and artists from Shakespeare in As You Like It (1599), to Robert Rauschenberg in his combine painting, Canyon (1959). In Kahn's painting, she includes snippets of comics that reveal the sexual ambiguity of superheroes. In a speech bubble, a cartoon cat is saying: "What uncanny power...is forcing me to drop down on all fours...I'm being turned into a...MEOWWW!---Cat Woman answers "Yes, I really am the Cat Woman. This magic wand transformed you into a super cat which must obey my every command!" Here Kahn slyly references catamites---the ancient roman term for the objects of homosexual desire.

Kahn's work also includes a series of painted portraits---all reference classical painting and question shifting structures of gender and personal identity. In Newspaper Announcements, Kahn paints images of gay couples as they appear in their wedding announcements. The Ben-day dots (tiny spots of color that make up images in the newspaper ) are playfully recreated in these portraits, which make up an appealing grid of pink and blue canvasses. Kahn offers empowering and transgressive reinterpretations of mythology and tradition through her exploration of the personal and political.

Kahn, former drawing instructor at Tulane University, moved to the Bay Area from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Meet the artist on Saturday, October 25, 1-6 PM.