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MIKE WEISS GALLERY - Nora York and Jerry Kearns

301 views · Published 11 July 2015 · 5:58 · Indexed 22 October 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2015 · Entertainment

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Mike Weiss Gallery is pleased to present Diva’s Song, the second show by Jerry Kearns and the first in collaboration with singer/performer Nora York at the gallery. The exhibition features eight acrylic wall paintings of larger than life size characters as high as eight feet, seemingly out of a comic book, with thought bubbles that form a coherent yet ambiguous narrative. Merging his own “psychological pop” aesthetic with York’s rendition of “Vissi d’arte” from Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, Kearns and York have reimagined the aria, isolating it from the operatic masterpiece and widening its narrative scope to encompass all the intrigue, drama, and emotional weight of a full length story.  Without the restraints of a canvas edge, the gallery becomes transformed into a democratized space – a stage where viewer and art, and reality and metaphor, play equally important roles.

The show begins with a theater banner that introduces the title character “Diva” as well as her gun-wielding cowboy boyfriend “Sugar”(or painter, if we’re following from Tosca).  The cinematic effect continues from here into three “shots” of the lone diva. Thought bubbles like, “Oh why, oh why, oh why, oh why, does this burden lay so heavy on my mind? Oh why, oh why, oh why?” take us into a vulnerable moment of existential anxiety, as if the distant future became suddenly, alarmingly immediate.

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