During the month of October, we have been featuring artwork from the exhibition at Florida State University's Museum of Fine Arts entitled Cute and Creepy.  The exhibition runs from October 14 through November 20, and we would encourage you to visit it in person if you are in the Talahassee area.  So far we've featured the work of Kelly Boehmer and Carrie Anne Baade, the curator of the exhibit; today's feature focuses on the work of Ray Caesar.

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Ray Caesar, Descent, 2008

The best thing about Henry James’s Turn of the Screw is that those children, Miles and Flora, really don’t seem like children—ever. They’re beings that discomfit the governess’s sense of self and what she calls reality. I think that Ray Caesar’s “children” do much of the same. They exist in the slipstream between here and there, while their eyes tell us they are still fully present, watching us watching them. Take for instance, Caesar’s work Descent, which presents us with an ageless beauty floating downward in an abyss. With a Lovecraftian twist of weirdness, her torso is a blend of petticoats and Cthulhu-like tentacles, paradoxically making her appear all the more vulnerable. On the sea floor lay sharp objects that threaten to impale the young heroine: upside down chairs, a baby carriage, sewing machine, and birdcage. Yet she is the one bearing the light which scatters the darkness; her gaze, serene, commanding, imperious, even, despite the pain she is about to endure.