Rosenbush Cafe

My favorite artistic and creative genius is busily preparing for the opening or her latest show with the surreal and beautifully haunting photographic series Resurrecting Ophelia by Kalliope Amorphous. I urge all lovers of high class art, who are in Rhode Island, or the surrounding states, or traveling through the area, to visit Kalliope’s exhibition.

RESURRECTING OPHELIA opens January 25th – February 19th, 2010, at THE FLANAGAN CAMPUS GALLERY COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF RHODE ISLAND. There will be an opening reception on January 27th from 4 - 6 p.m.

Kalliope is:

“an artist working exclusively with the self portrait photograph in an ongoing exploration of identity, archetype and myth.” Kalliope’s photographs are “…a series of self portraits exploring the archetype of Ophelia.”

A January 6th post on her site, Musecatcher, best describes her artistic purpose:

Amorphous’s photographic renderings of Ophelia are a journey through a dreamy, womb-like atmosphere where the boundaries between sheer horror and ethereal beauty are often blurred. Kalliope says her interpretation “focuses on Ophelia’s resurrection and her search for answers.”

In these images, created not underwater but through the use of in-camera techniques, Amorphous has created various visual interpretations of the character while maintaining a cohesive poetic theme. For the artist, these images represent both the demanding and the contemplative ghost who is simultaneously flowing and frozen in time. In this series of haunting photographs, Amorphous aims to “give strength and voice to Ophelia’s perceived madness and dispossession. She is the confrontational ghost of the alienated soul. On another level, I am also playing with the idea of water as both womb and tomb. That is, the element of water as it relates to birth, death and regression. I am working through personal ideas of isolation and alienation in these images, but ultimately the viewer may take something from them that is entirely different.”

Kalliope Amorphous works with the self-portrait in various series, using her own face and body as a canvas. Her work ranges from interpretations of pre-existing iconography to compositions meant purely to provoke and challenge perceptions. Self-taught in photography, she takes an intuitive approach to composition and lighting and works without the aid of professional lighting or studio equipment.

Kalliope says of her work, “I am not a photographer or a narcissist, but a performance artist with a camera. I want to push the boundaries of what I define as self and other by playing with ideas of identity, gender, archetype and the myriad ways in which they can be represented.” She typifies a new wave of largely self-taught artists who work independently of establishment art schools, public institutions, and mainstream movements in art, and who are becoming widely known as unique and independent artists, -primarily through the Internet. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and Europe.