ART REVIEW: Arusha Gallery & Rhiannon Salisbury: Ancient Deities

For the exhibition Ancient Deities (on show until the 18^th of October) Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury and the curatorial team from Arusha Gallery selected eighteen artists to create a re-interpretation of pre-modern deities in present times. The mystical is brought to Arusha Gallery through an array of responses varying greatly in the selected deities and techniques used. Through figurative and abstract artworks, through paintings as well as sculptures; the artists have reinterpreted, in a contemporary key, classical iconography. The resulting exhibition offers an explosion of visual cues, subtle references and hint to mythological stories which can be found in the layered artworks that compose Ancient Deities.

I had the pleasure to talk to Rhiannon Salisbury who explained to me her influences in creating Lilith. The deity she chose has the homonymous name of her artwork; she is Adam’s first wife who was expelled from Eden as she refused to subdue to him. Lilith, although only briefly mentioned in the Bible, was vastly known in ancient times and in contemporary days she became a feminist icon. The themes of gender and sexual liberation emerge from Salisbury’s abstract oil painting through the use of biomorphic shapes and pink tones, which may be read as a hint to nudity and gender-conforming femininity at once.

The theme of nature is another recurrent motif throughout the exhibition. Jessica Wetherly’s Green Man visualizes the pagan deity guardian of nature surrounded by seed bombs of indigenous plants. Wetherly invites the visitors to take the seeds with them and plant them to protest for self-sufficiency as she states that ‘rewilding with indigenous seeds can address the current food, farming and climate crisis’. While Wetherly offers a guerrilla-like response to the environmental crisis, Nuclear Focus Sculpture by Billy Fraser paints an apocalyptic vision of what the future holds after humankind. Fraser chose Godzilla as his inspiration and created an apparently lifeless planet with a black square carved within it where a monolith stands in the bare ground. His multi-layered artwork, enriched by a brilliant play of lights, reflects on the fleeting and perishable nature of humankind and of our artefacts and deities. Like Godzilla’s rage impacts anything and anyone crossing its path, all humanity is doomed by decadence and death.

Ancient Deities is an open window on a mystical world which connects past, present and future. The relevance of ancient deities transcends time, connecting human experiences across époques and beyond this current moment. Set in this tumultuous historical period- full of uncertainty- the theme of the exhibition offers itself both to an escapist reading as well as an apocalyptic one. Through ancient knowledge we can encounter newly-found hope in the future. This reading key is visualized by Rebecca Harper’s Pandora’s Shrine of Hope, which teaches us that once Pandora’s box has been emptied of every harm, what remains inside is hope.

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Sofia Cotrona

Writer at reviewsphere

Student of History of Art and Business at the University of Edinburgh. Born and grew in Turin (Italy), I received a secondary education focused on languages (Spanish and French) and then graduated from the United World College of the Adriatic (IB). My International Baccalaureate diploma focused mainly on Visual Arts and History of Art. I am passionate about the social impact that art can have on modern society and always excited to engage with new forms of art.