Photographers often speak of taking or capturing an image, implying possession, which is particularly loaded when speaking of nudes. In Bathers, Exposed, I’ve painted bathers appropriated from works created by men, framing them within vintage wooden film holders, much as photographic negatives would be, and, like film, inverted them into their “opposite” or complementary colors. Flesh tones became vibrant blues, reminiscent of Matisse’s Blue Bathers, and I’ve mused that perhaps his inspiration came after intense study of a model, closing his eyes and seeing her etched on his eyelids in the opposite of warm flesh tones—complementary blue. The structure of the film holders is integral to the work. The thin black slides, often imprinted with the word “EXPOSED,” can be raised or lowered, creating a peep show effect, where the flesh of the bathers becomes analogous to the film the holders were designed to protect, and viewer is transformed into voyeur.
Tabitha Vevers has exhibited across the country and in Europe and has work in numerous public and private collections. Her work was recently featured in On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women as Yale, and was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition, Tabitha Vevers: Lover’s Eyes, at The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC and was featured in a major exhibition entitled GOLD, at the Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria. She was honored with a mid-career retrospective entitled Narrative Bodies at the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum.
Vevers is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The George + Helen Segal Foundation, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and painting fellowships to The Ballinglen Arts Foundation (Ireland), Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Germany), Fine Arts Work Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The MacDowell Colony. Vevers was a co-founder of artSTRAND and has served as a member of the curatorial committee of the Provincetown Art Association + Museum, the admissions panel of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Artists’ Advisory Board of Truro Center for the Arts. She received her B.A. from Yale University and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting + Sculpture.