Kimberly Berg

Logan Riley

In the world of mys­ticims and sacred cul­ture, woman is the cen­ter of the uni­verse. Woman the cre­ator, the bringer of life. It is woman, in the guese of the Hecate with their yarn and scis­sors or Diane and Artemis with the Moon and night sky or Psy­che enam­or­ing the epit­ome of love itself that has dri­ven ancient and mod­ern cul­tures. For a time though, the role of women has been mis­placed, swept under the rug to make room for machismo and male dom­i­na­tion. But, as they did then, things change.

imberly Berg is restor­ing women to their right­ful place. Berg almost acts like the Tarot’s High Priest­ess– she ush­ers in the unseen, draw­ing back the mys­ti­cal cur­tains, mag­i­cal forces to enlighten The Fool– rep­re­sent­ing the world. Her art, as she says, is a door way (not an expla­na­tion). A door­way for the viewer to cre­ate and imag­ine a mes­sage. Kim­berly Berg mixes the female form in a mul­ti­tude of poses (some strong, some merely pas­sive, but none weak) with mys­tic and sacred images like the sun, man­dalas and even the metaphor of the dark wood. Using the ever mal­leable media of pas­tels, graphite, and other mixed media Berg man­ages to both draw focus to the woman sub­ject as well as express a piece of the uni­verse in the back­ground. Some­times the woman blends with the back­ground like in God­dess I and II, while in Vis­i­ta­tion of the God­dess the woman is the cen­ter and the back­ground. In her Cre­atress series (mainly mixed media) Berg brings sub­ject and metaphor to the front. Many of her women are preg­nant, ful­fill­ing a nat­ural and divine rite– cre­ation, the bring­ing forth, the holder of the sacred Yoni. Kim­berly Berg breathes life into her art, a divine birth of cre­ativ­ity where art is the pla­centa that sus­tains the world while it grows, devel­ops, and even­tu­ally becomes enlightened.

Kim­berly Berg’s work will be on dis­play at the Flo­rence Bien­nale 2009.

http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolio/i/isisrising/