The paintings on the ground floor of Bridge Art Space at Charoen Krung are ostensibly feminine, but "Monologue" is an all-woman art show that wasn't intended. The assumption that art is feminine because it is made by female artists — Elissa Ecker, Melanie Gritzka del Villar and Aranya Khunchawattichai — comes naturally by extension.
In fact, exhibitions featuring only female artists are rather hard to come by in Bangkok. Currently there's also "The Lost Paradise Of Childhood", featuring nine young female artists at the G23 Art Gallery of Srinakharinwirot University.
"When I think of the word monologue I think of Jimmy Kimmel standing up at the beginning of his show and he's just talking at you and it's fun," said Ecker. "And when you think of a woman talking at you, you're like, 'Shut up'. Or that's what I think people think."
But this isn't the case here at an exhibition of artwork by three women, which is also curated by a woman.
The subjects of Ecker's paintings are in silent opposition, not in conversation. Two girls look in opposite directions at handheld mirrors, hair knotted together in a single braid, trapped. Next to it are two figures wrapped in a cocoon, facing different ways, allegorising the way people behave to each other in various relationships.
The works of Gritzka del Villar and Aranya are autobiographical, fitting roughly into the theme of the first floor section.
"Monologue is presented by a single character, most often to express their mental thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character of the audience," the gallery states.
Gritzka del Villar's series began in 2012. She was reading Carl Jung and recording her dreams. She painted those narratives, bright and colourful in an intersection between mandala paintings and Cartoon Network's Adventure Time, laden with symbols and meaning. She painted each of the four paintings intuitively.
In Dig Deep, she is a rose, her roots finding their way to five oases: a diamond, a feather, a pearl in a shell, a pyramid and a spade. The pearl feeds the city and the vines on both sides are weighed down with anchors. A snake and a ladder connect the layers of leaves on which sits a "sleeping beauty rose" within a glass jar, a sleeping figure in a farmer's hat under a beach umbrella, a vase of dice, an owl and a bird. Each painting alone would send Freud into a frenzy of interpretation.
Gritzka del Villar didn't understand the meaning of the things she painted — many of the symbols recur throughout the series. She says it was about a year later, after she and her partner broke up, that she studied her own works and understood her subconscious speaking to her.
Aranya's works consist of new paintings she produced for this particular exhibition. Her body of work has always consisted of women, but this time she painted girls, looking straight out into the world.
The gazes are empty, haunting. By the bar hangs a painting of a pair of girls, red-cheeked, skin smooth like porcelain. Their stillness speaks of a quiet rebellion.
"Experience as a young child makes you who you are," says Aranya. "I'm reflecting upon the past, but basing them off my feelings now." This explanation becomes clear when you get to the 3rd floor of the exhibition, which the artists themselves playfully put together.
The 2nd floor features the theme "Dialogue: Literary Form Consisting Of A Spoken Conversational Exchange Between Two Or More People". A video of each artist sitting in front of the others' works and talking about them plays on a loop. Each doesn't talk about or defend their own works. The three artists know each other to varying degrees. The video doesn't add much to the art, but serves to drive home the point of the monologue theme.
Ecker said of Aranya's works: "They're in a weird place between childhood and adulthood. They aren't children and they're not adults. I don't know what they are. There is no name for what they are. The eyes always look like they've seen something awful, like puppies being murdered. They are so methodical and smooth [in the way they were painted]. There's something very unsettling." The 3rd floor is refreshing.
"For me, the 3rd floor was a chance to show what a curator maybe wouldn't show." Ecker said. "I feel like my oil paintings, the longer process, are usually a way to get to the work that I'm actually showing now, which is more important for me. I think that's more representative of who I am and where I'm going."
Her works, among many, include a scroll with breasts painted on them, a braid painted on a roll of receipt, Chinese finger-traps made with synthetic hair, a drawing of two women connected by pubic hair braid (it's funny rather than gross) and a painting of a net of high heels, reminiscent of Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes.
"I'm starting to be convinced you make one body of work in your lifetime," she said. Here, the concept of her work becomes apparent: entangled relationships and unwitting connections through repetition.
Similarly, Aranya's works here are more interesting and revealing. On a wall, she hangs frames of paintings of the girl, of photocopied images of herself as a young child, of the painting superimposed on the girl. Her works are a process of self-reflection and discovery.
Monologue brings together the exploration of the complexity of emotions, of what happens on and beneath the surface of relationships.
Perhaps one can listen to paintings, or read them like personal essays. Perhaps one would even be driven to engage in a dialogue.
