Diana Georgie: Pleasure Paradox

01 Feb Diana Georgie: Pleasure Paradox

Diana Georgie:
Pleasure Paradox
February 1-28, 2018

Artist Reception: Sunday, February 11th 3-6PM

Typography in extravagant settings, barbarism in opulence, and a comic lack of impulse control are all framework for Diana Georgie’s meditations on kitsch, which burst from momentary observations into existential conundrums worthy of Dostoyevsky. In Pleasure Paradox, Georgie confronts us with a series of single-word statements culled from her Instagram account. Removed from that context, each morpheme is destigmatized. Words posted pejoratively have been robbed of their intent and juxtaposed with floral motifs that represent a shifting paradigm of female empowerment.

Georgie works predominantly in the painted medium, often combining floral elements in a kind of analog, acrylic, text collage. Her years in front of the camera and her implementation of advertising slogans evoke a level of irony that is more self-aware than self-conscious and her unapologetic employment of blunt innuendo is a playful yet confident rebellion against the notion that beauty is a quiet flower. Here, frailty is not gender-assigned, but a backdrop for disclosure and accountability.

“The pursuit of pleasure is both thrilling and aggressive, it is essentially the primary and most important driving aim of human life, to experience gratification and just be happy. Somewhere along the way, practical difficulties are surely to be encountered, and unfortunately for the hedonist, the constant and conscious pursuit of it interferes with experiencing it. Pleasure Paradox is about the thrill of the chase, getting to the sweetest part of the fruit and the high that comes with it. Yet inevitably, you will get to the pit, and you have to spit it out, or else you’ll choke on it. The pursuit that comes with a cost, like a moth to a flame, that is part of our human instinct. It’s lingering with one’s own temptations, the budding blossoms and their come hither appeal, the promise of satisfaction, and on the contrary, the over reaching grip that never truly grasps.” – Diana Georgie

Diana Georgie was born in St. Petersburg in August of 1990, and shortly after her family immigrated to San Francisco just prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Georgie relocated to Los Angeles in 2008 to pursue a career in modeling that has brought her into collaboration with some of the top visual artists in the field, including David Fincher, David La Chapelle, Paul Marciano, Norman Jean Roy, Darren Tieste, Tyler Sheilds, and Randall Slavin (among others), and she is still a highly sought beauty subject. In 2015, street artist Retna collaborated with Georgie to create a prolific series of billboards and murals–for which she posed. Suddenly the muse had a mentor. This past year, Diana was prominently featured in the Guess campaign.

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