REBECCA STORM: Jaw

DURAN | MASHAAL is pleased to announce the unveiling of "Jaw," marking Rebecca Storm's inaugural solo presentation and her second exhibition with the gallery.

Furthering the artist’s exploration of the somatic relationship to conscious and subconscious memory, the works in “Jaw” contemplate the forces that inform our experience of personal agency. Am I driven by fear, or am I driven by desire? Which one, if either, leads to self-betrayal?

Rendered in a painterly, realist visual language that at times verges on expressionism, the works interrogate the psychic landscape of choice—through themes of shame, fear, desire, trust, anxiety—and how we respectively navigate this experience. Jaws function to physically invite things inside of us, a process which serves here as a figurative framework for the spiritual relationship to self.

Functioning at times as the archivist, and at others as the unreliable narrator, elements of fantasy occasionally emerge in Storm’s work, as a way of offering optical euphemism and allegory. A broken glass mask suggests the futility of disguise; an egg, fragile and symbolic of organic potential, made impenetrable and sterile by a silver veneer; an ode to Dante’s ninth circle of hell considers self-sabotage; an ambiguous memory of a childhood dog—lifelike yet lifeless. Each work seems to occupy a space that precedes action; gleaming on a tense precipice, suggesting the tactile ease and rapidity of destruction that juxtaposes the immense resource required to rebuild something. To what extent does an awareness of repercussions transcend impulse?

Often implementing clair-obscur, light also functions in a metaphorical way in Storm’s practice, alluding to spiritual awakening, or at times, bankruptcy. The works in “Jaw” consider the disparities of agency—what we may feel, versus what we choose to do.