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Linda Matney Gallery

5435 Richmond Rd
Williamsburg VA
(757) 675 6627
Contemporary Art Collections/John Lee Matney Curator

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From Hurt to Harmony: Body Image and Consciousness in Transition

February 8, 2012 Kim Kirby
body-image.jpg

From Hurt to Harmony: Body Image and Consciousness in Transition

Works by Susan Singer and John Lee Matney
February 8 – March 18, 2012

From Hurt to Harmony brought together two artists—painter Susan Singer and photographer John Lee Matney—whose deeply personal practices confront and reframe the way we perceive the human body and our interior lives. Spanning life-sized nude portraiture, psychological photography, and multimedia installation, the exhibition offered a compelling meditation on how art can navigate the space between trauma and transcendence, the visible body and the unseen mind.

Singer and Matney approached similar terrain from different angles. Singer’s vibrant, life-scale paintings draw from real experiences—her own and those of her models—to present the body not as an idealized form, but as a site of memory, resilience, and dignity. Her subjects, rendered with radical honesty and affection, reclaim the gaze. Each portrait counters the media-driven distortions of beauty by affirming the quiet power of presence: stretch marks, wrinkles, and scars become emblems of truth rather than flaws to erase. Her paintings are not simply representations—they are testaments to survival, to aging, to joy. In Singer’s work, the body becomes a sacred archive of the self.

John Lee Matney’s contributions complement this bodily honesty with psychological depth. His photographs—at once cinematic and intimate—explore states of vulnerability, tension, and transformation. Matney’s lens isolates moments where the personal veers into the symbolic: a glance that carries fear or tenderness, a pose that evokes both safety and estrangement. Drawing on his background in fashion photography and informed by his longstanding interest in archetypal imagery, Matney’s work operates at the threshold between interior consciousness and social space. His figures appear caught in ritual, memory, or dream, suggesting that every body is also a vessel for the unseen, the unresolved.

Curated as a dialogue, From Hurt to Harmony invited viewers to trace a path—from raw exposure to affirmation, from fragmentation to awareness. While Singer’s portraits celebrated the body in its fullness, Matney’s photographs interrogated its limits and its mysteries. Together, their works moved across a spectrum: physical, emotional, spiritual. The exhibition did not offer easy resolutions; rather, it posed a question—how do we reconcile the way we see ourselves with the way we are seen?

In a culture saturated with filtered images and curated perfection, From Hurt to Harmony stood apart. It asked us to look longer, to feel deeper, and to recognize that the process of healing—whether personal or collective—requires both confrontation and compassion. Through two distinct but converging practices, Singer and Matney offered the gallery as a space of reflection, a space where hurt might begin to harmonize into something more whole.

 
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