These recent sculptures by Victoria Vesna merge archaic and contemporary mythologies with the female body as the ideological key. We reappraise archetypal roots which lead us to prepatriarchal junctures.

Basic shapes of a column, hoop, obelisk, introduce the range of metamorphosis. Each sculpture has a definite relation to some historic event ... uniting classical forms with contemporary catastrophic imagery.

Here scale implies monumentality but is executed within human proportions ... almost within hands' grasp; just as these surfaces increase visual paradox with unexpected textures or vivid colorations: black, red, white, gold and grey.

And startlingly certain sculptures incorporate video non-conventionally: images are beamed from a monitor hidden within a red obelisk or a white classical column; a monitor is housed within a black lacquered box as if the container for an ancient tea ceremony has been induced centuries later to become a setting for a horrendous video tape on the bombing of Hiroshima.

This interplay of discrepancies between scale, material, historic and popular mythologies is physically calculated. Each sculptural concept has taken root in a preceding performance work ... an initiation ritual experience, a lived action from which Vesna has evolved three dimensional, static structures.

Intention, meaning and metaphor are situated in the body; and when the generation of the body of work and body of experience is a female body then all our traditional insights are put into question, are marked as questionable.

Because the body as a source of creative authority interjects a radical position: a female embodiment which is not a muse, hand-maiden, martyr, saint, goddess, idol, whore or madonna.

An artist's body situated as prima materia as the basis of organization ... tactile, visual so that skin and screen, eye and electronic particle are in fluid exchange.

CAROLEE SCHEEMANN