The Bathing of the Vestals 2015

Curator: Jana Brike created this captivating oil painting, "The Bathing of the Vestals," in 2015. Editor: The pallid figures almost seem to melt into the silvery light. It’s both sensuous and spectral, the women exuding this eerie fragility. Curator: Brike often employs a romantic, figurative style with influences from contemporary art. Here, we see it used to portray, what seems like, a moment of intense intimacy. The title invites considerations of female agency and autonomy. The Vestals were, of course, priestesses. Editor: Exactly! It's like Brike is appropriating and re-imagining the roles of these historical women, liberating them. I love how she subverts the expected narrative, inviting us to examine the themes of sexuality and self-discovery within a feminist context. There’s something radical in this vulnerability. Curator: And how does the seascape figure, literally, in your read of this picture? Is it about some sort of immersion, psychological, even spiritual, or the breaking of some kind of social stricture? Editor: The seascape acts as a liminal space, a backdrop to this exploration. The sea always symbolizes freedom, purification, the subconscious—elements aligning perfectly with the themes present in this painting. It emphasizes their defiance and their embracing of the natural world as a source of power. Curator: True. The fact that they’re not *actually* bathing but rather poised at the shoreline amplifies this sense of becoming. This aligns with our understanding of visual culture as it reflects power and ideology, as women often figure, as we know, either absent from, or as marginal to the stage of socio-historical agency. The painting also brings the viewer into question. We have this picture; how is this information, if it is information at all, doing the work? Editor: Brike, through the languid gesture, compels us to look into the nuances of the intimate moment and, at the same time, the relationship that ties to the subjects' interior states, reflecting, ultimately, back at us. That the gaze is mostly averted makes us more interested. Curator: I'm leaving this with more questions than answers, that's for sure! Thanks for the exchange. Editor: My pleasure. These subtle subversions make it memorable.