Fire of Origin

Fire of Origin
Tara Sasiadek
Oil on Canvas
24” x 52”

We all have stories we tell about ourselves, and sometimes they become more myth than reality. When I was eleven, my family’s house burnt to the ground. We were safe, and for a child unconcerned with insurance and the like, the major effect of this event on myself was creating a fascination with fire. This painting is from the prologue of a graphic novel in progress, called Logos, but it also draws heavily on my memories of that house fire in my own past.

Burning Bush

Burning Bush
Tara Sasiadek
Mosaic on Panel
72” x 48”
$1400

Burning Bush is a politically charged play on words, in three heavily mosaic-covered panels meant to evoke the ornate church adornments of Byzantium. The first panel proclaims that God Speaks in nature, as in the burning bush of Moses, as the bush catches fire with divine speech, impossible to behold directly. The middle panel portrays a public figure hubristically claiming to “Speak for God,” and the third declares the right of every individual to speak for themselves without fear of persecution by the state, represented by a burning “female bush.”