Clytie, 2008

As in many of Colomba’s works, this watercolor expresses her intent to create an alternate history of black identity, expression, and community through the appropriation and disruption of traditional Western representations of biblical or mythological female characters. According to the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sea-nymph Clytie was spurned by the sun god, Helios (later called Apollo), and slowly wasted away while gazing at his chariot traversing the sky; she was then transformed into a flower that always turns its face toward the sun. Although the flower in Ovid’s tale is thought to be a marigold or a heliotrope, by the seventeenth century it was usually depicted as a sunflower, native to the Americas. Here Colomba envisioned the traumatized Clytie as a woman of color, clothed not in classical drapery but in a mid-nineteenth-century ball gown. Squeezed into the corner of a lavishly decorated interior, she shrinks away from the sunflowers displayed in a Neoclassical vase on the mantel and the Baroque painting of Apollo above.