Figuration Commentary

The Drawers - Daphne Gerou Commentary by Julie Oakes

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The Dark Side - 2009, Headbones Gallery

With the dark simplicity of graphite where the eraser has cast a glow of unearthly significance on the scene, Daphne Gerou's implied narratives bridge the genres of fantasy and reality. The dark depictions make a quantum leap from cute to ominous. The uniformed bunnies' passive expressions, their lack of identifiable differences, their cool personalities (or are they only timid?) set up a dynamic of menace. It is not the seething rage of horror about to pounce, but an insidious suspicion of the irrevocably unjust situation that the less demonstrative species are caught in by virtue of modernity and industrialization.

There is not hopelessness in the vista, however. The bunnies are outfitted and, naturally silent, they appear organized in their bid to adjust their dilemma. The bunnies are on the move.They are leaving in the dead of night like refugees exiting an occupied zone. They are navigating by signs that are foreign to their habitual naturalism. The bunnies are glowing in the dark as if they had eaten radioactive fodder. Uniformed, armed and signalling to far distant bunnies, they are migrating strategically. The bunnies have apparently discovered something that mankind hasn't quite grasped yet - that there is an imbalance - “the time is out of joint”.