Surface Tension
Surface Tension
Artist Tara Goreau and Her Large-scale Murals
“Like water, I have no skin…only surface tension.”
—Gretel Ehrlich
While there are many forces at play that preserve the status quo of our economic landscape, there is need and desire for a more sustainable path forward, and I hope this exhibition illustrates the precarious, yet optimistic mission set out before us. —Tara Goreau
At the Athenaeum Hall Gallery
March-April 2023.
The Bubble, 2022
Community Collaborative Mural with St. J Community
Latex on Panel
Painted with the St. J community at six events throughout the summer of 2022, this mural was designed to highlight the hopes for the Caledonia Food Co-op: namely, to support a more sustainable local food system in Caledonia county. Each 4’ x 4’ panel seeks to describe how an unsustainable facet of the current global food system could be countered by localizing a food market with a co-op. These notions include reducing fossil fuel consumption by buying from local farms, reducing plastic waste with bulk buying and encouraging the use of reusable containers, widening access to nutrition, and creating an environment that honors worker dignity at all levels. These intentions will have to stand up to the realities of late-stage capitalism, illustrated by the other paintings in this show, hence “The Bubble.”
Pit to Pie
A Community Collaboration
Latex on Luan, 2021
We plant the seeds and hope they grow
the sun shines down- the rain and snow-
the winds pick up, the darkness looms
but in the moonlight, branches bloom
The pie, a symbolic sweet product of years of concerted collaboration between sun, rain, soil, time, seeds, stewards, and a little bit of luck, is a metaphor for anything that one must put their effort, care, and belief into to eventually reap goodness. In the case of this unfinished mural, the Caledonia Food Co-op aspires to plant the seed for a new enterprise that can eventually benefit the community. This collaboration was painted between thunderstorms last summer in front of the St. J Welcome Center during the last Get Downtown Event of the season.
“Legacy. What is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”
― Hamilton musical
The Swine Flew, 2011
3’x5’ oil on canvas
$3500
Painted at the height of the Swine Flu Pandemic, this play on words explores how unsustainable agricultural practice degrades the environment and breeds super bugs with harrowing effects on our population. Many more interpretations apply.
Citizens You Knighted, 2011 (End Stage Version updated 2023)
Diptych, acrylic on masonite
$1500 due to significant deterioration
Inspired by the Citizens United ruling that allows unlimited campaign financing from Super PACs, this is an example of how money and power devalues human existence. Big wigs recline in penthouses as conglomorate coorporation building robots gamble with piles of humans. This is how people are treated under capitalism. A depressed man observes the melee while drinking a beer, numbing himself from the acrid reality that he is caught in. The beer doesn’t make it better, just somewhat tolerable. This painting has been soaking in truck brine for a season to encourage crumbling.
The Garden of Manifest Destiny, 2011
Triptych, acrylic on masonite
$5500
This triptych is based loosely on the circa 1500 painting ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch and explores the founding of the United States in the same progression that Bosch explored the creation of mankind and it’s devastating fallout: Essentially we started with a mandate from God to go forth and prosper and did so with little restraint only to create hell on earth. In ‘The Garden of Manifest Destiny’ a horrible image of a hanging indigenous person ‘blesses’ the head of a white settler who has shot a bird out of a tree (as opposed to Eve’s apple). The woman is therefore made responsible, and only the death of the people who were here before white settlers allow us the ‘grace’ to go forward and exploit the resources. The blood seeps into the stripe of a road paved with nationalism, and so on ad nauseam as we move our environment past the point of no return, holding up the patriarchy as we relinquish any humanity or quality of life. You’re not supposed to like it.
