“From his bed… he would find himself on a stone staircase, in a meadow of tall grass, in a familiar room. This was the world within, half-remembered, half-suppressed. It was made from faces barely glimpsed in the train, stories skimmed in the newspapers, deep and unspeakable desires. He would touch a leaf, half-draw a curtain, to be sure he had stepped over. The sense of touch would reassure him. Light was murky there, as if underwater; babies were articulate, old-faced and wise; the sea stood vertical, and purple cats appeared when the carpet was rolled back. Sexual obsessions lurked in the folds of the landscape, terror in the floral furnishings of a house, and the dark was the journey from the womb in reverse.”

        - Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life

Sea View is pleased to open its inaugural exhibition on Saturday, January 28th with “River Styx,” a group presentation of contemporary and historic artists whose works ruminate the mythical landscape and the allegorical crossing of boundaries and time.

Curated by Brandy Carstens and Sara Lee Hantman, the exhibition includes contemporary and historic works by Salvo, Etel Adnan, Theodora Allen, Jean-Marie Appriou, Kelly Akashi, Dan Herschlein, Erica Mao, Mark Laver, Coco Young, Elsa Munoz, Heidi Lau, Gretta Solie, Frank Walter, Joseph E. Yoakum and Coco Young.

In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Styx is one of the rivers that lead to the afterlife, forming a threshold between Earth and the Underworld. It is the setting of the Greek musician and prophet, Orpheus, who would travel from one shore of existence to the other to retrieve his deceased wife, Eurydice. In Freudian psychology, to traverse the Styx is to drift into a dream, a cold plunge into our own subconscious. In Jean Cocteau’s symbolic 1950 film Orphée, it is the moment Jean Marais walks through a liquid mirror into his own reflection in search of love and eternity.

Each interpretation of this imagined landscape is rendered as a physiological yet psychic self-exploration in which the perimeters are slippery and indeterminate. A river is both a median and a conduit, and the works function as such: suggestive, introspective landscapes that replace the seemingly innocuous pastoral with cartographies of hope, desire, pain and pleasure. As Jean Cocteau asserts, “The region that I depict is a border on life, a no man's land where one hovers between life and death.”