September 30, 2014 - 21:59
I started this post looking for other artisits who have done representations or "portraits" of disability and kept feeling pulled back to Riva's work. The piece I looked at is "Neil Marcus: a Menorah for Gene Kelly":
The first thing I noticed was Marcus' position in relation to the viewer. He faces us, looking straight at us, but with his head cocked to the side. There's autonomy and personhood in this representation. He's sitting and – it seems – in spite of the narrow space in the wheelchair in which he sits, he takes a wide-legged position. His wheelchair is in water, which is a space it presumably would not work very well. He's holding an umbrella – it's propped on his left shoulder and anchored under his right arm, though neither hand actually do the action of holding. Both hands are closed and on his lap. Candles are tied to the spokes of his umbrella and are on fire, and on his knee is Jerry the mouse (from Tom and Jerry), running with a flaming match in his hand. The title and the umbrella work together to remind us of the dance scene with Gene Kelly in 'Singing in the Rain" – but this version is different as Marcus is neither singing, nor dancing, and in his current wheelchair-in-water position, does not appear about to begin either. Instead, Marcus' legs are in the water too and his pants are wet up to the knees. With the fire of the umbrella and the water Marcus sits in, perhaps Riva is playing with the elements and Marcus, in his rootedness in his chair, represents the earth. The medium of the portrait is charcoal, so it appears in grey-scale, but there is a huge amount of implied color and light: the water, the fire, the reflection fo the fire in the water. The candles on the umbrella spokes form a kind of Menorah – and lend a spiritual sense to the portrait.