“The dam of awakening breaks. Innumerable happenings pile on top of one another until, suddenly, our world is remade. Images, figures, ideas, and objects flood our senses. In the space between a blink, we are changed. The rabbit hole opens before us, and we fall in, never to return from whence we came. A rite of passage has begun, one which we can’t unsee and we can’t undo. There is multidimensional magic within the moment that childhood leaves and womanhood arrives. Like an ouroboros swallowing its tail, we join an eternally infinite event for the very first time. We can willfully ignore this rite, but we can’t avoid it. Failing to recognize the vital moment of initiation means failing to see the law of the universe.

This series of paintings directly point to that juncture. I celebrate the beauty and the shadow of that permanent shift in awareness. I ask that we see its consequence.”

-Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman

Face To Face, 2022
Oil and egg tempera on aluminum
14.5 x 18.5 inches

Second Street Gallery is pleased to present The Ceremony of Innocence, a solo exhibition featuring a series of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman, held in the Dové Gallery from October 7 - November 18, 2022.

Watch our Artists in Conversation virtual artist talk with artist Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman and Marina Granger of The Artist Advisory HERE.

Sullivan-Beeman’s work, both painting and drawings, examines the lore of the "girl" to empower femininity, question gender roles, and investigate the portrayal of young women in popular culture. She weaves together the heroine and animal personas to construct fictional, fantastical narratives. Her young women are usually teetering on the edge of naïveté while also steadfastly powerful and wise. As an artist, she strongly believes in the role of inventiveness and the importance of irony and fantasy in art. She also believes in idiosyncratic, individualistic, and eccentric art-making. Her subject matter and methods are both products of 3rd Wave Feminism and 1990s cultural movements like DIY. Her images and subjects originate in her dreams and reflect her love of allegory and iconographic glyphs. She likes to work from referential material and search hard to find her sources and models, sometimes using more than one image per subject to create a composite that most closely resembles her imagination's perspective. She always likes to work from something in the real world, creating a jumping-off point into the bizarre, the esoteric, and the avant-garde. With recognition of the progress of women’s rights since the Renaissance, she paints in a modified Renaissance era, labor-intensive style of egg tempera and oil called the Mische Technique. This technique was invented by men in the early 15th Century at a time when women had very little agency. Among original artworks painted in this style, only paintings by men survive. As a woman living and making art today, she takes pride in her technique and her subjects - strong women and their powerful animal souls.

Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman is a contemporary surrealist painter born out of the 3rd Wave of Feminism. She came into her own in Los Angeles in the 1990s alongside cultural movements like Riot Grrrl, Queercore, and DIY. As a self- taught artist, Sullivan-Beeman utilizes many DIY ethics and methods. Her paintings are a palimpsest that employs the imposed history and lore of the "girl" in empowering femininity. Her young women find their strength in a multitude of potentialities and sexualities. The iconography and simulacra in her transcendental works emerge from someplace subliminal. These elements reflect her view of the world and have metaphorical meaning through investigation of identity, gender, otherworldly narratives, and mythical animal personas. She often uses her dream journal as inspiration, exploring the collective unconscious with an overt curiosity for the bizarre and esoteric such as alchemy and the tarot.

Sullivan-Beeman lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and Vancouver, Canada. While she has a BFA in Cinema from the University of Southern California, she is a self-taught artist. Her work has been exhibited in notable galleries and museums such as KP Projects (Merry Karnowsky Gallery) in Los Angeles, CA; Haven Gallery in Northport, NY; Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, CA; WMOCA, Wausau, WI: Bert Green Fine Art, Chicago, IL; The Belskie Museum of Art & Science in Closter, NJ; Greg Moon Art in Taos, NM; Merlino Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea in Florence, Italy; Galerie Bruno Massa in Paris, France. Sullivan-Beeman has participated in art fairs such as Scope Immersive 2020, Aqua Art Miami, and Pulse Art Fair in Miami, FL; Seattle Art Fair in Seattle WA: LA Art Show in Los Angeles, CA; Art! Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. Sullivan-Beeman has had three solo exhibitions at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. She has been named a Finalist in the Imaginative Realism category by the Art Renewal Center three times.

This exhibition is a Season 49 Call for Submissions pick and is generously sponsored by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.