JANA BRIKE
Searching Within
The human psyche is on full display in Jana Brike’s surrealistic paintings. The pieces, which often feature women with butterflies and flowers surrounded by otherworldly colored landscapes, are autobiographical in the form of visual poems. The pieces are her own way of soulsearching, a way to rewrite her life’s story and heal or grow from experiences.
Her newest series of paintings, Soulsearching, is on view at Corey Helford Gallery through September 14, with the pieces continuing her inner and outer exploration. “Oftentimes it is indeed reflections about past experiences. But it is never in a very direct and straightforward way; more like multilayered tales where I am not just the protagonist of the most obviously present narrative,” Brike explains. The paintings, she adds, have complex archetypal figures that explore birth, death, separation from parents, initiation, marriage and the union of opposites.
Each piece—as with all of her series—is like a separate chapter of a novel where there are similar elements across multiple paintings that unite the entire narrative. The Soulsearching art—including the aptly titled Soulsearching where one woman holds her hands over another figures eyes and A Way to the Other Side that depicts two young girls wandering through a meadow with a butterfly net—is bound by colors and symbolism. For instance, she explains, “closed/invisible eyes in many of the paintings indicate a certain internal journeying.”
There also is a reference to a maiden and death motif, or “danse macabre,” that was popular in Renaissance art, which has always been an artistic inspiration for Brike along with fairy tales and ballets. This idea, Brike says, “reminded me of how equal everything living is with its fleetingness and fragility that everything we hold dear has its end embedded in it—events, circumstances, people, things—everything is so vulnerable, precious and beautiful in their impermanency.”