By Susan Aurinko
Photo – Doug VanderHoof
This month, rather than write about photographic or textile-collecting expeditions, I decided to share some insight about one of my photography series with you.
For time immemorial, painters, poets, sculptors, novelists, designers, composers, playwrights, photographers, and choreographers have been moved to create by a variety of muses. Some really lived and some are the stuff of myth, but the vast majority have been women. This series began when I searched for a way to celebrate the universal sisterhood of women as the inspiration for so much of the art, music, and writing we enjoy. Some years ago, I made the first images of this series, which now consists of twenty-nine images portraying the Four Seasons, the Four Elements, the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac, the Madonna and Child, Guinevere, the Three Graces, the Hindu Goddess Shakti, Joan of Arc, the Goddess Athena, Pandora, Ophelia, and the Chess Queen.
Muses and Mythologies makes real some of my visions of these inspirations for poetry, music, and art. The women portraying these fictionalized characters are all real women, not actors or models, and they range in age from four and a half months to my then-eighty-four-year-old Earth. They are students and bartenders, singers and yoga teachers, personal trainers and baristas, ballet dancers, artists, Executive Directors, and appraisers, and they represent all ethnicities – Caucasian, Black, Latinx, Asian, South Asian, and mixed race. They are single, married, divorced, LGBTQ. They are mothers with children, and women with grandchildren. All of them are from Chicago and were photographed in my studio.
I fashioned sets to photograph some of the muses in, and in other cases, photographed them in the studio and layered them into photographs I’ve made around the world. I created costumes appropriate to each muse from an assortment of garments I’ve collected or altered garments digitally from my own previous photographs. In the case of the zodiac, I added the constellation of each of the signs in post-production. In the Four Seasons, I layered the brushstrokes of paintings by Monet and Bonnard over the images of the models for an Impressionistic essence. Notably, Sandro Miller’s beautiful wife Claude Aline is my icy Winter, while lovely young Maddie Rogers portrays Spring. Actress Fawzia Mirza portrays Sagittarius and Author Gina Frangello’s lovely twins Kenza and Madeline posed as Gemini in the Zodiac. My longtime model Sheila Myrcic played the role of the Goddess Athena, Anuradhika Roy the many-armed Goddess Shakti, and Clara Langrall a fierce and determined Joan of Arc. Jewels erupt from Pandora’s Box in lieu of demons and monsters, and the baby Jesus is portrayed by a girl baby who is now twelve years old. I credit the liberties I took to poetic license. It’s been a fun project over the years, and I’m hoping to show it at some point. In the meantime, you can see the whole series on my website at: http://www.aurinkophoto.com/muses-and-mythologies
I want to mention my solo exhibition at ALMA gallery that opened last Friday night and will continue through the month of August. It’s another series – images of hotel beds I’ve inhabited while on photo-expeditions, mostly in Europe. For more insight, here’s the link – https://www.almaart.com/events/in-bed-with-susan-aurinko . There will be several events connected to the show over the months it is up, and I’ll post them here in my column. The first is a pop-up gourmet dinner on May 8th presented by the culinary studio TXA TXA Club, (pronounced Cha Cha) featuring scintillating food courses inspired by some of the cities of my travels, served inside my show! For info and tickets: https://www.txatxaclub.com/shop/p/alma-atelier-dinner-series-inbed
Enjoy the flowering of spring in Chicago! I’ll be back next month with a special Mother’s Day Column and a new scarf launch in memory of my Mommy.
Yours in Art,
Susan
