Moonstruck

Dina Yakerson presents an intimate body of work in which mythology and horror stories are fused into a painterly jigsaw puzzle. The series of paintings on view invites us to face the childish fear of the unknown hiding behind the closet door.

The exhibition consists of a series of oil paintings and chalk drawings depicting the journey of a man who wakes up in the night and finds himself in a mirage show reflected to him from the walls of his room. Yakerson juggles with archetypes of fear and the sublime, as allegorical hybrid creatures crawl out of the darkness. The show is centered on a large-scale oil painting, which corresponds with Titian’s painting The Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1570), recounting the story of the satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest and lost. The god’s chosen punishment for the loser was to flay him alive. Yakerson transforms the flaying story into a painting that oscillates between the grotesque and the nightmarish. It is an allegory for the sin of hubris of those engaging in the art of painting; a bacchanalia emerging as a vision from the dark.