The Butcher Boutique

Artist: Tramaine de Senna
Gallery: 20 GOTO 10
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 4, 2008
Address: 679 Geary Blvd


I came across their opening while picking out galleries for a friend. When I saw the jelly doughnut and read "disgust and desire" I knew this would be a good one. Read more below.

Recent works by Tramaine de Senna.

Disgust and Desire in the mundane attracts me. In food, anatomy, social status - I see them as décor. They are both vulgar and beautiful in their physicality and implied narratives. I approach these works as detached and classified by presenting them behind a screen, plasticized or mounted on plaques. This process makes them sacred, jewel-like and coveted. By playing with scale, texture and subtlety, my intention is to present an opportunity for focused stimulation and visceral ambiguity

Landscapes of flesh, moist, curling and raw are handled delicately on small scales. Ejaculatory donuts sit stickily, waiting to be devoured. Slithery intestines piped like frosting onto pink surfaces become repulsive yet edible. Found hair spindled and set on satin cushions become precious jewels. The fixed gazes of objectified performers control the viewer's degree of access - subtle eroticization based on the shift between porn and portraiture

Disgust and Desire are the poles that bind these elements to our daily lives, yet they pass unobserved beneath the minutia of modern existence. This show, The Butcher Boutique, is my attempt at a collection of preciousness in the mundane as found in the flesh. A specialized shop embodied in a boutique, focusing on the narratives of the flesh: devoured, coveted, worshiped, protected. These themes affect us politically, in class structures, beliefs systems and in the environment. Here between attraction and repulsion remains the tension in the mundane.