Sinister Duality, Harrowing Beauty: A Review of Nancy Prager’s Exhibit at the Kate Oh Gallery

We’ve all seen Edvard Munch’s The Scream.  Artist Nancy Prager achieves a similar sense of horror, dismay, and fear, and yet she manages to accomplish this using lyrical colors in superficially beautiful paintings.  Her work speaks to you through engaging you and drawing you way beyond surface appearances. 

Prager’s background includes a lifetime spent on the international stage combatting human trafficking. Her exhibit, Expressionist Scenes of Harrow at the Kate Oh Gallery combines her awareness of the cruelty of human trafficking with her artistic gifts for creating engagement and emotion.

My personal opinion is that Prager outdoes The Scream for one reason: her work encourages – or better yet, forces–you to go ever deeper in engaging with the work. The more you look, the more there is to see and the more there is to feel.

Viewing a Prager canvas means being drawn deep into the emotional content of the canvas.  At first glance, you’re seeing lovely colors. One of her patrons told her on seeing one of her paintings, words to the effect of, “I want this. It’s beautiful! I can see it in my dining room. I want to live with this painting.”

However, as the prospective buyer learned, her first impression of the painting, was deceptive. There was a sinister duality to the painting.  As Prager guided the woman into seeing more deeply into the painting, the buyer saw amidst the swirling gorgeous pinks and oranges that there were hints of dismembered body parts or cages or blood. 

A diaphanous smear of color, when examined closely hinted at a disembodied menacing presence, possibly a head. It could have been a trafficker. The body parts could be symbols of the suffering of trafficking victims. 

The prospective buyer decided against buying this particular canvas.

In many of the paintings at this exhibit, the image of breasts or legs or heads approach being figural and other times they are almost entirely abstract or shadowy and they only emerge after you have been looking deeper and deeper into the painting. They hint rather than explain.

Like a Noh play, that is, like the stylized Japanese theater in which you bring to the experience your background and personal interpretation, Prager’s work pulls you in.  However, it also draws out of you your experience of your world.

As an example, one painting shows slashes of rough-edged black paint across a flat plane of reddish-orange color For Prager, when she was creating the image, the black lines indicated the cages that trafficked Yazidi women were kept in when they were trafficked by members of ISIS.  But one of the viewers told Prager that the image of the bars on the colored background made her think of a faintly menacing tablecloth.

Prager was OK with this interpretation. Her goal is for people to engage and feel. She is pleased when viewers bring their whole self to the experience she has created. She’s not there to dictate the experience; she’s there to allow it to happen.

When you see these paintings, when you allow yourself to be drawn in and to experience the sometimes explicit, sometimes shadowy, sometimes dream-like feelings they create, you may notice that the paintings have changed you. You may feel a heightened sensitivity to the horror of human trafficking that goes on beneath the surface of what can look like beauty. 

 Visit her website at https://www.nancypragerart.com/