Persephone and Joan: In Oil and Light

Paintings by Julie Gearan and Photographs by Tina tryforos

NOR IS THE QUEST JUST A SCHOLARLY GAME; IT’S AN ATTEMPT TO PROVE, AGAINST ALL ODDS, THAT OUR WILD, WARRING SPECIES SHARES SOMETHING IRREDUCIBLE AT ITS CORE. – MANVIR SINGH

Are you a Whale or a Pomegranate?

In Persephone and Joan : In Oil and Light, works by photographer Tina Tryforos and painter Julie Gearan ask, How do we understand our lives through the stories we inherit, and what happens when we begin to rewrite them?

Both artists have spent the last several years circling two enduring narratives: the Greek myth of Persephone and the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. These ancient tales, long embedded in the Western imagination, emerge as personal metaphors for the cycles that shape women’s lives: caregiving and autonomy, rupture and repair, aging and renewal. They also reflect broader cultural considerations of how myths shape identity, how narratives reinforce or restrict agency, and what it means to revisit stories historically authored and illustrated by men. Rather than reject these canons, Gearan and Tryforos complicate them.

The opposition and interaction between the artists’ two mediums consider how and when photography holds a power that paint cannot and vice versa. How does each employ light and darkness, and what role does color play in oil, pigment, chemistry and light? What can be manipulated and controlled, and what should be left to the effects of time?

Together, Tryforos and Gearan reframe myth as living material. They approach their stories as evolving structures, open to reinterpretation, in conversation with the urgencies and anxieties of the present moment — from ecological fragility to psychological thresholds and the search for equilibrium in a fractured world. In these works, myths are not fixed but porous, plumbing the emotional and psychological terrain of descent, surrender, resilience, and return.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths – Carl Jung

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. –Herman Melville