PERSEPHONE AND JOAN : IN OIL AND LIGHT
Paintings by Julie Gearan and Photographs by Tina tryforos
Are you a Whale or a Pomegranate?
In Persephone and Joan, the work of photographer Tina Tryforos and painter Julie Gearan gathers around a shared question: how do we understand our lives through the stories we inherit, and what happens when we begin to rewrite them?
Although the artists work independently—and in distinct mediums—their practices move in parallel currents. Both 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 Western imagination, reemerge in the artists’ contemporary visual vocabularies not as illustrations, but as deeply personal metaphors.
Persephone Splitting Time (Portrait),Unstitched quilt made cyanotypes printed on fabric, variable sizes, shown here 10’x6.5’, 2025
Out to See, oil on canvas, 72"x48"
Their shared imagery—the whale, the pomegranate, the swimmer, the underworld, the industrial sea—functions as symbolic architecture rather than literal storytelling. In Tina’s cyanotypes, photograms, and multi-process photographs, forms surface from darkness through contact, light, and transformation. In Julie’s large-scale oil paintings, figures and landscapes hover in a liminal space between dream and embodiment. Both artists employ a kind of metaphoric mise-en-scène, staging moments that echo the emotional and psychological terrain of descent, surrender, resilience, and return.
The Fleeing Maiden, Cyanotype on vintage ledger paper, 17”x22”, 2023.
The fleeing maiden from Eleusis, on a ledger of Greeks living in the vicinity of Eagle Avenue in the Bronx
Their teeth are smooth and free from etched illustrations of conquest and love. No longer for chewing, they are anchors for you. You hold onto them. You are swallowed whole.
The works speak to the cycles that shape women’s lives: caregiving and autonomy, rupture and repair, aging and renewal. They also reflect broader cultural questions—how myths shape identity, how narrative reinforces or restricts agency, and what it means to revisit stories historically authored and illustrated by men. Rather than rejecting these canons, the artists complicate them. They inhabit the stories, stretch them, and give them new contours, asking where meaning has hardened and where it can still shift.
Eighteen pomegranates from one tree on the southern coast of Crete
Manvir Singh writes: “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.”
On the edge of downtown Providence
Persephone and Joan position myth as a living material. The artists treat these stories as evolving structures, open to reinterpretation and capable of absorbing the anxieties and urgencies of the present—ecological fragility, psychological thresholds, the search for equilibrium in a fractured world. In the conversation between their works, ancient narratives become contemporary mirrors: reflecting not only what has been, but what might be reimagined.
Together, Tina and Julie create a space where myths are not fixed, but porous—where descent becomes an act of inquiry, and return an opportunity for reinvention.
