Volandismo
New Paintings by Mark Dancey
June 13 – July 25, 2009

Opening Reception:
June 13, Saturday, 7 p.m. – 10 p.m.

Joseph Campbell said that myths are public dreams, while dreams are private myths. Painter Mark Dancey is producing strangely hybrid works that combine personal narratives with traditional myths. For his current series of round oil paintings of acrobatic nudes he studied the great ceiling painters of the past and has adopted their strategies for rendering the body in forced perspective. When we see figures from the low vantage point at which Dancey presents them, they seem to loom and float above us, and naturally appear in a mythical light. With a few symbolic props, Dancey's divine aerialists each inhabit a space that stretches to a three hundred and sixty degree horizon and invoke associations that are at once religious, erotic, and puzzling.

Taking its title from a Spanish word for an archaic theological science devoted to the study of flying beings, Volandismo is an exhibit of works that freely mix myths and dreams, mysteries and revelations.