Opening Reception: June 3, 6:30-9:30pm
Exhibition runs from June 3 - July 1, 2010
Long View Gallery‎, 1234 9th Street Northwest
Washington, DC 20001
(202) 232-4788‎ | LongViewGallery.com

In her first exhibition of works on paper, "The Dance before the Kill," Anna Davis adopts the pasodoble as a metaphor to contrast the fluidity of women's roles with the aggressive, prideful posturing of paternal authority. She has translated the gray "Frocasian" characters of her vibrant mixed media paintings into starkly black and white illustrations of entangled bodies. An amalgam of the terms "Afro" and "Caucasian," "Frocasian" designates the artist's construal of Primitivism's "noble savage" and symbolizes the utopist aim to transcend identity politics. On paper, however, these figures lose their uniformly gray hue, underscoring their cultural oppositions and differences in appearance. The flamboyant garb and histrionic facial expression of each character evoke the dance of the bullfight, as these attributes augment the dramatic tension between the sexes.
Press Release