In each of the female figure presented in Sarah Kahana's new works, there is something of BUTTERFLY MERRY: Merry as a "free woman-butterfly" and Merry as a "moral butterfly".
The Papua New Guinean wooden sculpture of BUTTERFLY MERRY, with which Kahana was acquainted with a few years ago, was the inspiration for the new series. The sculpture describes a woman in a flying posture with outstretched arms and legs; her fierce look and her features convey an immense power. It was carved wistfully out of longing to a girl named Marry who arrived to the village of Yentchen Mangoa at the upper Sepik river region, and eventually left the village. During her stay , the local men built her a hut on the outskirts of the village, to which they paid a visit when they became sexually aroused.
According to Kahana, "BUTTERFLY MERRY brought to my works dark, violent, threatening enigmatic and desirable masses into nearly sweetish colorfulness, and penetrating the acrylic fattened flesh mixed with varnish. In my previous works, among other, I dealt with the figure of a "woman-child" trying to seduce her audience with her feminine biting colors. In my new works I display a ripe female figure, who is confident in her own sexuality , and recheck the boundaries of seduction and freedom."
The woman in Kahana's works present a multi faced figure, which divulge various aspects of her identity, aspects, which are in a state of constant change. She is androgynous, monstrous, mysterious, defying and unobtainable. She appears in her full power and strength, she is great, conquers the space, changing color, positions and situations. She moves between extremes, burning, hovering ascending, crushing, sinking, withdrawing, dissolving, dying and resurrecting, always in constant movement.
The wings that are meant to make her fly are flawed. They are heavy or fragile relatively to the body, in a way that they are incompetent to fly. The dialog between the flight, that gives Kahana's feminine figure super powers like a super woman and it's disruption, represents the stresses she is subjected to and her ceaseless effort to maintain balance and control.
In one of the female characters, female genitals are presented next to male genitals as a symbol of the woman's connection to her inner ANIMUS – the manly, aggressive, dominating parts of herself (according to JUNG). Mind-body connection and struggles between weakness versus strength, control versus the lack of it, are expressed through the composition of both the forms and materials such as placing and showing internal organs on the surface of the body, distortions, magnification of organs, multi-layering of materials, dilution, transparency and liquidity.
Butterfly Merry joins a parade of the heroic, holly, erotic, romantic figures of the mythology and literature of the history of art, and touches each and every one of them. She portrays the struggle between the need to hold on , maintain stability and the desire to let go, to be free and defy the common conceptions. BUTTERFLY MERRY is also a story of longing, the longing of a man to a woman who is both Mary and Maria, and perhaps the longing of women themselves.
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