Marion Harris


Second Childhood: Moira Fain works with memory -- hers and ours -- to paste together narratives of childhood, real or imagined. At once playful and sinister, Moira Fain's collages are engaging and autobiographical.

Anthropomorphic rabbits and bears, pages from Dick & Jane-style books and altered images of the Madonna from medieval tapestries are recurring themes and images. Interwoven whimsically, sometimes suggestively, there can be a subtext of potential violence where innocence and childhood occupations seem threatened. The juxtaposition of a cute rabbit and and a roughly shorn rabbit's foot is unsettling.

Yet the stories told are not obviously contradictory - they are too subtle for that. Fain avoids the obvious by combining scrambled words and disassembled images to lure us into odd spaces with a distorted perspective.

Moira Fain invites us, her adult audience to step through Alice's Looking Glass so that we can see childhood through her eyes, while opening our own eyes to what was hitherto invisible.

©2011 Marion Harris | By Appointment | 1225 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10128 | 212.348.9688