Carnival Fabulon a Geek Love Exhibition
opens August 10th 2024 is a new group show centered around the classic masterpiece Geek Love by the great late Katherine Dunn. This tribute exhibition opens in person at Brassworks Gallery August 10th but previews start a earlier. Be sure not to miss the over the top big top gallery show!
CONTACT THE GALLERY FOR MORE SHOW INFO! I have one painting in this show and of course I had to focus on OLY! I read this book several times since I first read this in my early 20s back in the 90s and it was always one of my personal favorite books! The way Katherine Dunn strings sentences together is like magic! She is a painter of words!
Here are some of my favorite quotes that make my heart sing!
"A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour."
“Like colors or a spring tree against that kind of blue sky that pulls your heart out through your eyes. Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees, he was like that, the geek boy.”
“I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, "Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right." The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting lollipop or a toy bear'd worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skull for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.”
—Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
I hope you enjoy the greatest show on earth ;) till next time,
Sweet Dreams, Angie
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