Cherry Hood, mother of three boys, paints pictures of boys. Adolescent boys. Many boys. Billboard-sized boys with pouty lips and defiant gazes. They are sullen, confronting and magnetic. They are technically brilliant, provocative and disturbing.
The Australian artist, who gives a talk at Emily Carr, Tuesday, before her show opens at Diane Farris Gallery next Thursday, is interested in how unused we are to seeing images of the boy, while young girls are universally accepted as the erotic symbol.
The way our culture represents female adolescents in art and popular culture instigated Hood's first series of digital prints of male subjects in 1996. She made simple gender transformations of images of girls found in popular culture — scanning Balthus paintings and giving his girls haircuts and penises. "Suddenly these paintings," Hood writes, "loved by even the most traditional conservative, became shocking to a similar audience. Why was this? One minute the paintings are about art the next they are about pedophilia." The uproar that show caused has fueled her motivation ever since.
Larry
Hood's exhibition at Diane Farris Gallery consists of monumental portraits painted from photographs. They are composites of several people from magazines, photography books and her own snapshots. Her fictional children are then given names: Harry, Maurice, Christopher -- as if to make them more real.
Gallery owner Diane Farris comments on the vulnerability and malleability of the faces. "There is something exciting about young people as they begin to understand what life is really like, their whole lives ahead them. These faces look directly back at you. It creates a challenging encounter."
To that, Hood remarks: "It is the audience who provides the personality, character and a narrative for the images."
© 2003 Vancouver Sun
