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Arts & Entertainment

Artist's Reception: Photo Exhibit

Eve is a Fecund Goddess: A Photographic Exhibition by D.W. Gastelum

Photographer D. W. Gastelum, also known as El Imagenero, has taken inspiration from the poem “Come Sweet Death,” written by B. Davie Napier and published in 1967. Napier has recently passed away, but was a theologian and educator for decades. In the poem he has used much of the “human history” set out in the biblical book of Genesis and put it in concrete terms. With respect to Eve, Napier has Adam complaining about the garden, about the lack of opportunity for growth in understanding and adventure . . . until he finds Eve. Then, he decides that the garden is “tolerably fair” after all, because “Eve is a fecund goddess.”

With Eve, he can understand the essential difference between all the other things in the garden, not to mention what may lay outside the garden, and that which is truly “good.” Eve represents perspective, and most of all, human community.

 The full group of images shows Eve as that which we can immediately identify as “like us” or at least qualitatively different from everything else in the world, and that which makes an otherwise troubled and limiting world at least “tolerably fair.”

The overall group of images includes frames full of imagery in which a human figure is just one small, but unmistakable, element, and others where there is almost or entirely nothing but the full or partial human figure.

The exhibit,  displayed at the Long Beach Art Theater, consists of black & white archival prints of images that capture and communicate feelings of social identification, but also isolation.

The exhibition runs from Saturday, Nov. 6  through Friday, December 9. Artist's Reception, Sunday, November 13, 5-6 pm

Contact: Michael Stearns/Michael Stearns Studio                                                                                     
Phone: 562.400.0544
email: info@michaelstearnsstudio.com

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