THE PORTRAIT: HISTORIES, MYTHS, AND ALLEGORIES

At Matney Gallery in Williamsburg, The Portrait: Histories, Myths, and Allegories invites viewers to step beyond the static façade of portraiture and into a living narrative. A portrait here is never just a likeness – it becomes a story, a memory, a myth. This exhibition explores how identities are not fixed images but evolving tales woven from history and imagination, personal memory and cultural myth-making. Each work on display reveals a face or figure as a dynamic canvas where time, legend, and allegory converge, challenging us to see the portrait as something alive and deeply resonant rather than a mere mirror.

Lee Matney, *Richard(*(left) and Frank Rodick, *Frances (each day is cold)* (2012)

As viewers move through The Portrait: Histories, Myths, and Allegories, they encounter a rich interplay of voices and visions. Despite the disparate styles and backgrounds of the artists, threads of identity, memory, and myth are woven throughout the gallery. A viewer might notice a certain dialogue between works – how one portrait’s gaze seems to answer another across the room, how symbols echo from one canvas to the next. In this curated assemblage, portraits become portals through which multiple stories pass. They commemorate histories both personal and collective, from the triumphs of ancestors to the struggles for social justice. They reinvent myths for our times, populating the gallery with contemporary saints, prophets, and fantastical beings that reflect our dreams and anxieties. And they spin allegories that resonate today: an intimate drawing might hint at the fragility of memory, or a large-scale digital print might satirize the masks we wear in the age of social media. The exhibition ultimately challenges any notion of the portrait as a static form. Instead of a fixed image, the portrait emerges here as an ever-evolving narrative — a visual tapestry in which each thread (each artist, each sitter, each reference) enriches the whole.

Pictured: Jill Carnes, Autumn Owl and Steve Prince, Ubuntu: Baldwin's Place

Steve Prince, LOU COHEN, Jeffrey Whittle, Frank Rodick, Lee Matney, Jill Carnes, Jadea Knight, Nicole Santiago, Brian Kreydatus, Ivan Plusch, Olga Tobreluts,OLEG DOU, Christi Harris, Bob Krueger, Brittainy Lauback, Brian Freer, Billy Martin and others

Jill Carnes, *Two Birds Talking About The Old Days,* Punch needle (left) and Lee Matney, *Jeremy Ayers,* Photograph

Intersecting Currents in Portraiture: Curator John Lee Matney has intentionally gathered a constellation of artists whose diverse practices together expand the possibilities of the portrait genre. Established voices known for socially charged imagery stand beside emerging talents and global visionaries, creating a dialogue that spans geography, generations, and genres. New Orleans-born artist Steve Prince, for example, uses art as “a tool to battle social issues like violence, racism, and injustice,” producing work “interwoven with social metaphors and symbolic messages.” His vivid, graphic portraits function as visual sermons on community and redemption, fusing personal narrative with collective history. In a complementary vein, Athens, Georgia-based Jill Carnes brings “a rare synthesis of intuition, memory, and mythology” to her drawings and painting. Carnes’s whimsical yet haunting portraits—populated by folk characters, animals, and ancestral spirits—invite us into a world that feels “both ancient and immediate, personal and universal. Placed in conversation, Prince’s socially conscious imagery and Carnes’s folkloric visions bridge the realms of history and myth, showing how portraiture can commemorate cultural memory even as it conjures fantastical allegories.

Academic Voices and Human Narratives: The exhibition also highlights academic voices—artists who are educators and influencers of the next generation—infusing the gallery with introspective rigor and classical technique. Professor Nicole Santiago’s representational paintings, for instance, are best known for their narrative figural scenes, “weaving visual storytelling” into depictions of everyday life, In her work, a cluttered room or a domestic moment becomes a candid self-portrait of lived experience, rich with subtext and emotional truth. In contrast, fellow William & Mary professor Brian Kreydatus focuses on the human figure with unflinching honesty, often “grappling with the physicality and vulnerability of the human body” and the limitations of the human condition. By rendering bodies and faces in intimate detail—or even depicting the space where a figure’s absence is felt—Kreydatus strives to “make the familiar unfamiliar through the intense scrutiny of looking”. The result can be jarring or poignant, like seeing oneself anew in a stranger’s face. These academic artists ground the exhibition in a deep understanding of art history and technique while probing personal and universal themes. Their portraits remind us that even an observational study of a model can carry narrative weight—each wrinkle or gesture hinting at a life story, each gaze connecting past and present.

Global Mythologies and Allegories: Adding an international dimension, contemporary Russian artists represented by the gallery infuse the show with grand allegorical and mythic imagery. Olga Tobreluts, a pioneer of digital art in Russia and member of the Neo-Academism movement, reaches back to classical antiquity for inspiration – only to turn those ideals on their head. In her work, ancient gods and legends are reborn in pixel and paint, as she “turn[s] to the ideals of eternal beauty and reason, if sometimes just to turn them inside out”artfocusnow.com. Her portraits might place a modern face on a Greek deity or dress a digital sculpture of Aphrodite in contemporary guise, blending neoclassical revival with subversive deconstruction. Fellow Russian artist Oleg Dou takes a more futuristic approach: his eerie, porcelain-like digital portraits use metaphor and mythology to probe the psyche. In works inspired by tales such as Narcissus, Dou manipulates photographed faces into otherworldly beings, “transform[ing] photographic images of human faces” with airbrushed perfection and surreal adornments. These haunting figures become allegories of modern identity – Dou’s use of “metaphor and mythology is used… to examine the tenuous balance between vanity and vice”, holding a mirror to our obsessions with beauty, youth, and self-image. Meanwhile, painter Ivan Plusch offers a more socio-historical allegory. Having come of age in the turbulent years after the USSR’s fall, Plusch creates portraits and scenes marked by the ghost of Soviet realism. He “reinterprets art history and tackles the norms of social realism”, integrating its monumental imagery and ideology into his contemporary paintingsl. Figures in his work may appear amidst peeling propaganda murals or melting monuments – visual metaphors for a society in flux. By weaving the iconography of a bygone regime into present-day contexts, Plusch’s portraits carry the weight of collective memory, exploring how personal identity is shaped by the forces of history. Through these global perspectives, the exhibition interlaces classical allegory with current sociopolitical reflection. The Russian artists’ contributions underscore that a portrait can be as much about myth and society as about an individual – each face here bears witness to broader cultural tales of metamorphosis, vanity, upheaval, and resilience.

Emerging Voices and Personal Mythologies: Further enriching this tapestry are emerging and local artists who bring fresh eyes and new narratives to the portrait tradition. Jadea Knight, a young Virginia-born multidisciplinary artist, uses the camera and film to turn portraiture into an act of self-discovery and empowerment. Her work explores “identity, transformation, and connection, often featuring Black women (including herself) in dreamlike vignettes that blur reality and myth. In one piece, a woman’s silhouette might dissolve into a landscape or merge with ancestral imagery – a poetic visualization of personal growth and lineage. Knight believes in storytelling’s power to “inspire and preserve”, creating “visual narratives that resonate on both a personal and universal level”. In her portraits, the subject is not passively observed but an active narrator of her own tale – reclaiming authorship of stories that history too often marginalizes. Alongside Knight, other rising voices contribute intimate allegories of identity and memory. Photographer Brittainy Lauback, for example, captures everyday moments with a raw honesty that “reflects the emotionally chaotic reality that we experience daily”. Her portrait-based works, often set in the American South, mingle nostalgia with uncertainty – as if to ask how our daily rituals and private vulnerabilities form the portrait of an era. Such works infuse the exhibition with a sense of immediacy and authenticity, reminding us that myth-making is not only the stuff of ancient legend, but also a continuous process in our own lives. Each emerging artist in the show brings a new chapter to the unfolding story of portraiture: some question whose stories get told, some commemorate unsung individuals or communities, and some subvert conventions of representation altogether. Together, they ensure that the exhibition’s narrative is a living, breathing one, open to revision and surprise.

A Living Tapestry of Portraits: As viewers move through The Portrait: Histories, Myths, and Allegories, they encounter a rich interplay of voices and visions. Despite the disparate styles and backgrounds of the artists, threads of identity, memory, and myth are woven throughout the gallery. A viewer might notice a certain dialogue between works – how one portrait’s gaze seems to answer another across the room, how symbols echo from one canvas to the next. In this curated assemblage, portraits become portals through which multiple stories pass. They commemorate histories both personal and collective, from the triumphs of ancestors to the struggles for social justice. They reinvent myths for our times, populating the gallery with contemporary saints, prophets, and fantastical beings that reflect our dreams and anxieties. And they spin allegories that resonate today: an intimate drawing might hint at the fragility of memory, or a large-scale digital print might satirize the masks we wear in the age of social media. The exhibition ultimately challenges any notion of the portrait as a static form. Instead of a fixed image, the portrait emerges here as an ever-evolving narrative — a visual tapestry in which each thread (each artist, each sitter, each reference) enriches the whole. The collected works urge us to reconsider what it means to capture a likeness: is it to freeze a person in time, or to illuminate the many stories that person contains? In this gallery, the answer tilts toward the latter. The portraits on view do not sit quietly on the wall; they speak, question, and even provoke. They invite us, the viewers, to become part of the dialogue – to see ourselves within these histories, myths, and allegories. In the end, The Portrait: Histories, Myths, and Allegories is a celebration of portraiture’s capacity to question, commemorate, and subvert the narratives we live by, and a poetic reminder that every face can be a map of stories waiting to be discovered.

THE PORTRAIT: HISTORIES, MYTHS, AND ALLEGORIES

Steve Prince, LOU COHEN, Jeffrey Whittle, Frank Rodick, Lee Matney, Jill Carnes, Jadea Knight, Nicole Santiago, Brian Kreydatus, Ivan Plusch, Olga Tobreluts,OLEG DOU, Christi Harris, Bob Krueger, Brittainy Lauback, Brian Freer, Billy Martin and others

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