Vanitas is a Latin word used since the Renaissance to describe the transitory nature of life. The term characterizes the appreciation of life’s pleasures and accomplishments joined with the awareness of their inevitable loss.  Artists Candy Depew, Myra Mimlitsch Gray, Katherine Kaminsky, Audrey Hasen Russell and Gae Savannah each explored this theme for a contemporary audience, drawing on its 17th Century origins in Dutch Still Life Painting.

 

More superficially but inescapably, this period recorded the affluent circumstances of the artist or patron who commissioned them: fine linens, crystal and fresh, abundant food, the stuff of life. Countering this show of vanity, many historic still-lifes were vanitas paintings, reminders of the brevity of life, which emphasized fleeting material pleasure as a contrast to infinite, ineffable spiritual joy. Ultimately these representations of decadence, over-embellishment, decay and waste are reminders of mortality. Presenting objects that symbolize earthly pleasures and the ephemeral nature of both art and life, these artists presented works in ceramics, metals, glass, fiber and mixed media that reflected each artists’ perspective and consideration of this genre.

 

Artists Myra Mimlitsch Gray and Katherine Kaminsky appropriated symbols that were traditional to the vanitas theme, even containing certain standard elements from its history, such as elaborate tableware, skulls, and flowers. Gray focuses on the supports for fine dining and decadent foods through her treatment of such items as a classical salver or an escargot dish. The distortion and exaggeration of these once functional items appear as fleeting and ephemeral as the objects they were intended to support. Kaminsky used the classical symbolic meaning of flowers from 17th century still life painting. Using sugar and other materials such as plaster, her flower arrangements and imitation of taxidermy in the presentation of animal heads has a direct allusion to mortality that the artist describes as  “an exploration a relationship between a healthy fulfillment and a sickly excess.“

 

Themes of nostalgia and remembrance characterized the glass sculptures that were on view by Audrey Hasen Russell. Her works were reminiscent of the small town in Eastern Tennessee where she was raised and where her father works in functional glass. Still-lifes composed from traditional bowl forms are turned into sculptural objects that reference the idea of a false preciousness and a desire to return to childhood, ultimately referencing the transience of life itself.

 

In the work of Candy Depew and Gae Savannah, excess is a celebration. Candy Depew’s work included a live performance, a variation of the tableau vivant (living picture), which incorporated porcelain drawings and bone china works visually woven with vinyl wall graphics, digitally printed fabrics, and models. 

 

Feminine beauty is also the subject of Gae Savannah’s “cakes.” Overflowing with bright transparent materials lavishly piled onto tables, these massive sculptural objects represent the results of over-consumption. Savannah described these as, “frothed up castles of delusion: hyperbolic princess-lands that ooze the saccharine, nuclear-pink glow of the girl toy aisles in FAO Schwarz. With Nabokov’s poshlust, (gaudy, contrived beauty,) the Cakes embody both entrancing appearances, and the intoxication they kindle.” Savannah’s work indulges in the spectacle of “prettiness” while referencing its ephemeral nature.

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