Tabitha Vevers: BATHERS, EXPOSED
We are excited to be exhibiting Tabitha Vevers’ new series, BATHERS, EXPOSED as we welcome her to the Gallery. Her 18 powerful paintings on vintage wooden film holders are of bathers appropriated from art history. The referenced paintings have been reversed from positive to negative, completely changing the nature of each painting and its colors. They are small and fit discretely into the film holders, which measure up to 8x10”. When the holder is closed, “EXPOSED” is evident. When the slide is raised, the painting is visible. They are delicate, intimate, and specific to the original painting – with the reveal, we become the voyeur.
A nude photograph of Lee Miller in a bathtub was the catalyst for this work. Taken in 1930 by her father, Theodore Miller, it seemed to exemplify the inescapability of the male gaze. We often speak of “taking” or “capturing” an image, implying possession, which is particularly loaded when speaking of nudes. In Bathers, Exposed, I’ve painted bathers appropriated from art history, framing them to be physically contained within vintage wooden film holders, much as photographic negatives would be.
The structure of the film holders—mechanically complex and yet ingeniously simple—became integral to the work. Their thin black slides, often imprinted with the word “EXPOSED,” can be raised or lowered, concealing or exposing the bathers to varying degrees. With this peep show effect, the flesh of the bathers becomes analogous to the film the holders were designed to protect and, the viewer is transformed into voyeur.
Inverting the images from the positive to the negative in black and white or converting color images into their “opposite” or complementary colors seemed logical. In doing so, I was struck by how flesh tones became various shades of blue, reminiscent of Matisse’s Blue Bathers. Perhaps Matisse’s inspiration came from closing his eyes after intense study of his models, seeing them etched on his eyelids in the opposite of warm flesh tones—complementary blue. I considered mounting the paintings upside-down in the film holders, as they would be seen on the ground glass of a view camera, but ultimately decided against it. In a final nod to photography, I have incorporated palladium leaf into most of the paintings, referencing early palladium prints.Tabitha Vevers 2021
(In 2018, Gus and Arlette Kayafas loaned me a gelatin silver print of “Lee Miller in the Bath” by Theodore Miller, after seeing a number of paintings, sculptures and a short film I had done exploring the relationship between Lee Miller and Man Ray.)
Tabitha Vevers is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The George + Helen Segal Foundation, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and painting fellowships to The Ballinglen Arts Foundation (Ireland), Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Germany), Fine Arts Work Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The MacDowell Colony. Vevers was a co-founder of artSTRAND and has served as a member of the curatorial committee of the Provincetown Art Association + Museum, the admissions panel of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Artists’ Advisory Board of Castle Hill Center for the Arts. She received her B.A. from Yale University and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting + Sculpture.
Vevers has exhibited across the country and Europe, having work in numerous public and private collections. Her work is currently on exhibit in On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women as Yale, at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. It was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition, Tabitha Vevers: Lover’s Eyes, at The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC in 2019-20 and was featured in a major exhibition entitled GOLD, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria in 2012. She was honored with a mid-career retrospective entitled Narrative Bodies at the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum in 2009.
