Description
‘MEDUSO!’ by Ian C. Hess
Artist: Ian C. Hess
Title: ‘MEDUSO!’
Medium: Acrylic, charcoal, and copper on wood panel
Dimensions: 48″ x 48″ x 2″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2024
Artwork Will Ship From: USA
About the Artwork:
Meduso! A creature of legend & terrifying beauty.
It has been told that he is accursed to gaze upon marvels of stone & statue – surging them to life. Sleeping gods, broken statues, fossils, temples– animate into life in a flash of transformative power by his eyes alone! Lidlessly peering onto ruin, rubble, & sculpture in the lands of times passed, Meduso, wanders. With every activation of his gaze, antiquity is brought to life both monstrous & elegant. With every gaze, in turn, he fades, rusts, & petrifies himself.
Meduso, head adorned in the seven lizard serpents that drive him endlessly forward with their hunger & venomous scheming. They say if you get close enough you can hear their sharpened tongues flickering, a constant hiss of cursing. Unable to separate nor fight the serpentine whispers & their unyielding desire to persist the curse within him – Meduso has grown tired & terrified of his fate. Cursing their name with every piece of his skin calcifying into an eternal tomb – he must escape. Yet, there is but a single way.
He quietly seeks, unbeknownst to his coiled serpents – his equivalent, his mirror, his love. The tragic Medusa– by gazing into her & her onto him– they’d free themselves of their fate– both violent & miraculous. Like the frog kissed by the princess & the sword Excalibur embedded within rock – they’d be freed of an impetuous curse from spell-casted prisons by destined liberators. Together, the petrified victims of Medusa & the monstrosities reanimated return to their lives or their graves. A perfect cycle of death & life– they will complete each other through a piercing spectacle!
Look into his animating eyes– deeply only if you wish to animate something frozen within you. Something forgotten. Something once thought dead– but you must mind that it kills some small piece of him. Meduso, know his name with woe, for he seeks his love & breath to be without venom & death. To be freed of lidless eyes & to know he will die in the arms of a lover, forevermore. – Ian C. Hess
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
Ian C. Hess explores the beauty of brokenness expressed through the shattered, graceful, and failed myths of yesterday. While coinciding with the Japanese Philosophies of Wabi Sabi (acceptance of transience and imperfection) and Kintsugi (treats breakage as beauty to be emphasized), he aims to reinvent aspects of these categories into present tense embodied forms, adorned in the textures and idioms of our time. The central theme of portraiture expressed through the means of broken Grecko – Roman busts serve as the foundational constant amongst the myriad of techniques, and varied perspectives of the human ideal. The pieces work to synthesize a plurality of elements comprised of the past and present with universally recognized imagery within each painting as a specific locality that brings with it a generative power. All myth was once personal experience.