“TEARS ENOUGH TO DROWN ME BUT I SWIM”

Iza Thomas
Curated by Gaby Mizes

Wednesday, March 27th through Saturday, April 20th, 2024

Women, I think, exist in two worlds at the same time. The first one is the everyday world with lovers and children, friendship, and daily routine. This world is also one where the never-ending obligations and expectations heaped on women are taken for granted and the invisibility of our existence is a fact of life. The second parallel world --our interior world-- is where we nevertheless dance towards the light. It is where we get our resiliency, our strength, and our grace to manage and go on in the face of the indifferent gods. I use magical realism to depict both of these worlds.

The mannequins in my paintings and the props come from sudden lucky finds in dusty antique shops and online auction houses. They convey the sense of being real and not real simultaneously, the way women feel often.

And yet the everyday earth has its joys. My husband wrote the poems that accompany my paintings so art can bring us together. He is always there through the trials and tribulations of creating a painting. He helps me out of difficult moments that I find myself in. As a result, he is able to capture in words the message that I want to convey through my brush.

So that is what I am trying to express in these series of paintings, our resilience and our strength. This is best captured in the line that I use as the title for my exhibit from the poem Defining Worlds by G.Y. Baxter: “Tears enough to drown me but I swim.”

Romance

we make our worlds you and i
you with your drum and your soldierly arrogance
me dancing towards you in laughter and love
in the small shadows and stippling sunlight 
you will soon be gone 
but your love and this remembered world 
will remain

– Suresh Thomas

Teofila

I walk the echoing halls of the castle in Kornik
And as I slide along the glistening wood floors 
the picture of the Lady in White stares down with that studied 
indifference of the nobility
And yet they say she walks the halls at night in muttering despair
walks her gardens filled with the skeletons of her birds of
paradise and her camels
walks the library filled with the scientific books that she devoured 
Oh, the tormented sorrow of that legend 
perpetrated by the descendants of a populace that despised her
For all her mighty strivings to break through her time and gender
nothing remains, nothing is remembered
only superstitions that she fought against 
to bring in the indifferent tourists 
we leave our worst selves behind

– Suresh Thomas