Janice Hathaway
Eternal Empress
2023
Eternal Empress is a meditation on beauty as both relic and resonance. An antique stringed instrument and a provocative figure, draped in lace with her décolleté exposed, elicit an image of femininity. The bell of a decorative horn encircles a ring of jewels and pearls that ornament the figure creating a tension of the intimate and the ceremonial while strings from an antique instrument hum with harmony not as stillness but as the meeting of contradictions. The glow of headlights evokes urban noise surrounding this timeless figure enhancing the meeting of contradictions that live through the old and new, sensuality and restraint and a presence that lives eternally still listening. The Eternal Empress is neither past or present existing in a space between memory and desire while the world moves around her.
Eight photographs were combined including an antique stringed instrument and a bell of a horn from the DeWitt Museum, rubies and pearls from the Victoria and Albert Museum, a female figure, an inaugural gown form the American History Museum in Washington DC, and nighttime traffic from the World Trade Center in New York.