Vanitas, Vanitas

Five prints on the subject of reemerging and recalcitrant diseases.

Vanitas refers to a type of dutch 17th century still life designed to remind the viewer of the fleeting quality of life. For example, a magnificent collection of books and scientific instruments reflects the owner’s pride in his education, while a skull displayed among the other specimens is a vivid reminder that, no matter how learned he was, death still awaited him.

Nkonde Nkonde depicts a skeleton in 3/4 pose dancing with a beautiful woman who averts her eyes from his fierce expression. She wears a necklace made of animal teeth and a link belt and bracelet. Bees circle the woman’s head and nest in her hair while flies and assassin bugs crawl up her body, becoming a decorative part of her skirt. The back of the skeleton is covered with nails driven haphazardly into the bone. The border is also composed of randomly placed nails. The Nkonde are African religious icons covered with nails. They usually have a roughly carved human or animal head, which is always aggressive and deliberately terrifying. In the hands of a witch doctor, their spell can influence the course of illness. The skeleton depicts death, a metaphor that dates back to the middle ages, and is dancing with the young woman in a modern rendition of the “Danse Macabre” or “Dance of Death” tradition. Flies, carriers of disease, are also connected to the devil, Beelzebub — literally “Lord of the Flies.” However, another ancient tradition believed that the image of a fly offered protection from the “evil eye.” The woman’s jewelry is worn as an amulet and her kimono is embroidered with enlarged images of several different bacteria. Combining medieval and African tradition with actual images of a disease indicates that even the young and the beautiful dance with Death and that modern science sometimes is no more effective than magic in keeping Death at bay.	Nkonde ed. 60 14 x 10 rare $10,000.00 matted | Order
Ring Around the Rosie Ring Around the Rosie is a reference to the child’s rhyme that is often connected with one of the plagues that swept Europe in the Middle Ages. “Ring Around the Rosie” alludes to the first appearance of the disease as a red splotch circled by another ring. The remainder of the rhyme is also relevant to understanding this print. “Pocket full of Posies” refers to the herbs or posy that were carried in a vain attempt to ward off the illness. “Ashes, Ashes, We all fall down” indicates death that finally came to most who caught it, which was a large portion of the population in Europe; for example, one of the epidemics that swept through Europe during the 14th century is thought to have killed 20 million inhabitants in 4 years. In the foreground a young girl is seated, playing with the rats that encircle her. She is menaced by a tall, black bird-like figure behind her, wearing a nose cone; during the plague doctors wore nose cones in a futile attempt to protect themselves from contagion and to mask the stench of the death all around them. Additionally in folklore, birds, psychopomps, are seen as messengers between the worlds of the living and the dead. In the background, children are circling around big bold black X’s, which were attached to the houses to indicate that the plague had struck there. These letters are the most prominent geometric design in the composition and, looking somewhat like a swastika, contribute to the sinister overtones of the work. The border is composed of boxes and resembles a game board, a reminder of the uncertainty of life. The contents of the boxes are fleas, which carry the plague, the “Evil Eye” and amulets to ward off the disease, and the biohazard symbol which is a modern version of the “X” used in the middle ages. The flowers in the border are an ambivalent symbol: on the one hand they are fresh and alive, but, on the other hand, they could be used to mask the smell of decaying bodies.	Ring Around the Rosie ed. 60 14 x 10 only 6 prints remain $1500.00 | Order
Antigenic Shift In the foreground of the print an androgynous teenage girl stretches birdlike hands to ward off an onslaught of terns. She is also menaced by small boys wearing masks. Influenza viruses are divided into types A, B and C. Types A and B circulate in human populations and mutate constantly, resulting in the need for a modified vaccine every year. At times, a new influenza appears to which nobody is immune because no one has previously been exposed to it. This is called an Antigenic Shift and it occurs at irregular intervals. Some antigenic shifts result in local epidemics or global pandemics. Three major Influenza pandemics have occurred in this century; in 1918, 1957 and 1968. The pandemic in 1918 alone- known as Spanish Flu — killed more than 20 million people. There is evidence that the viruses which caused these pandemics originated from animals; in 1918 from swine and in 1957 and 1968 from avian strains, explaining in another fashion these elements within the print. One of the first deaths in 1997 from the so-called Bird Flu in Hong Kong [Influenza A (H5N1)] was that of a thirteen year old girl. Prior to this, H5N1 was known to infect only various species of birds. First discovered in Terns in South Africa, this is the same strain that infected chickens in Hong Kong in 1997.	Antigenic Shift ed. 60 14 x 10 $750.00 | Order
O’er Ladie’s Lips, Who Straight On Kisses Dream The title of the print O’er Ladies’ Lips Who Straight on Kisses Dream refers to a line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The next line of te play reads “Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues/Because their breath with sweetmeats tainted are.” This gives a further clue to the meaning of the work. Mab is a Celtic fairy queen who, like the Nkonde, can either bring good fortune or affliction. According to Shakespearean scholars, the blisters noted are an obvious reference to Herpes Simplex Virus 1 (HSV-1), the type of herpes that attacks the mouth. Although often thought of as a modern scourge, herpes (from the Greek word meaning “to creep”) has been around world wide for eons. The virus comes in many forms and cannot be eradicated from the body once it has found entry. In this print, an aggressive demanding central figure sits on a large ball. The ball, designed from sample photographs taken by cryo-electron microscopy and image reconstruction, represents the virus. The flower-like formations of the microscopic images of the virus contrast with the unsightly sores that appear on the skin. The various forms of the disease in which it can manifest itself are represented by the motley crew behind the central figure. The zippers suggest the most infamous form of Herpes (HSV-2), the genital variety. Some 55 million Americans carry this form of the virus.	O’er Ladie’s Lips, Who Straight On Kisses Dream ed. 60 14 x 10 $750.00 | Order
Aedes Aegypti In this complex print a small girl is lifted on flimsy man-made wings, high above a crowd of reaching hands, as a breeze lifts her skirt. The background of the print is made up of a subtle web of intertwined mosquitoes. The border of flowers suggests a Victorian practice of photographing dead children within a decorative wreath. These memorials were called “cabinet cards.” In this engraving the man-made wings suggest the failure of modern medicine to eliminate the threat of mosquito-borne diseases from the Western hemisphere. They have always been killers in the Third World. In recent times, the Ades aegypti mosquito, alone, has re-colonized 21 countries where it had thought to be eradicated, causing a resurgence of many of the diseases it transmits. The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control is currently concerned about the presence of dengue and dengue hemorrhagic fever in Puerto Rico. Dengue often serves as a harbinger of urban yellow fever to come. In the past outbreaks have occurred as far north as New York and Philadelphia. Although this print proceeded the current mosquito borne West Nile Virus by several years, this new threat on the East coast of the United States attests to it’s relevancy. Modern urban lifestyles, far from creating a barrier from these potentially dangerous insects, provide a continuously more attractive environment for their proliferation.	Aedes Aegypti ed. 60 10 x 8 $750.00 | Order