Ray Caesar Solo show at Dorothy Circus Gallery Rome @dorothycircusgallery Opening 20th October 2018 🌹 Preview and waiting list [email protected] My figures are anatomically "creative" under their clothes so I wouldn't necessarily define them as exactly "female". They are reflective of my own inner self image and therefore more feminine and also a bit hermaphroditic in physicality. In the piece "Shoes My Father Souled" there is a story as my Father had horribly deformed feet from untreated childhood arthritis. Back in the 1960s, when he came home from work he was in unimaginable pain. It was my job as a child to unlace his stiff leather shoes and carefully pull them off, peel off his socks and soak his feet in a bowl of epsom salt bath. My Father was a brutal, violent and narcissistic man and his pain only made him more difficult and angry, but there was a sensuality about soaking these deformed painful feet as they were hidden most of the time. Toes would bend and go under each other, and joints wouldn't be where they were supposed to be, and toenails were thick and discolored and almost hoven, like a demon. They were surreal, and being feet, there was an erogenous private sense of something you don't show people which doesn't exist today the way it did then. I lived in a childhood of sexual, physical and mental abuse and neglect, and I was terribly afraid of my father but I was also compassionate to his pain. I also learned people were not as they seemed under their clothing, and that life is mysterious and full of surprises of the things people hide in body and mind. My father was a salesman and occasionally sold shoes but I also think he was grooming me to be a bigger nastier monster than he was by making the shoes I would wear in life in his image. They were the shoes of pain he souled for me. 🎩 UPCOMING exclusively at DCG Rome ★ Ray Caesar SOLO SHOW – “Lost in a Fragile Myth” ★ Opening 20th October 2018 🌹 Preview and waiting list [email protected] 🎨 Artwork image: Ray Caesar – Shoes my father souled (ed. of 20) #dorothycircusgallery #raycaesar #upcomingexhibition #contemporaryart #digitalart #angels #artinrome #hifructose https://www.instagram.com/p/BpHr6cWjaUF/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=wrbe10i5f9xl
