The Seven Stars
Michelle 진아 Song
The Seven Stars—To look at Song’s paintings is to look into portals. Or, perhaps more accurately, to have portals look into you. The figures, femmes emerging out of the near- darkness of the gloaming, or returning to it, are tangled in webs of tropical flora, and each other, stars hovering in their otherworldly mi(d)st. Their environment is assembled from parts both earthly and cosmic. Their skin, a deep violet, marks their otherness, and potentiates their power.
The tableaux reference both classical mystical symbolism– serpents, vines, the moon– and contemporary, maybe even queer, markers– hair braiding, butterfly tattoos, stars and flowers floating all around. The various forms of sentience, including landscape works with no figures, give form to an ongoing inquiry into the healing practices of women before imperialism, the knowledge of indigenous spiritual tradition, and belonging/becoming in the present.
-Rocket Caleshu
blades of stars singing
a butterfly whispers hi
forest hugging me
-Alix Ross
Michelle 진아 Song (b. Hayward, California. 1989) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. In addition to their painting practice, they hold space for a traditional Ashtanga Yoga program, and are the special projects designer for the Philosophical Research Society. Song holds a BA in Fine Arts from UCLA