The lively, timely, diverse and slightly eccentric group exhibition FEMINIST VARIATIONS at the Loft at Liz's has been one of the great joys of my curatorial career. When artist Susan Melly contacted me to help expand and produce her idea for a group exhibition, she offered the exciting opportunity to explore feminist theory and experience from a more aesthetic, even esoteric viewpoint than the conventional polemical discourse. It was irresistible...
Susan Melly: ARMature
Susan Melly's own work in painting, assemblage, mixed media sculpture, and installation is grounded in the objects, materials, tools, iconography, personal memory and societal symbolism of dressmakers' accoutrements -- especially vintage design, and largely inherited from her mother's considerable household archive. Through her appropriation and interpretive rearrangement of traditional domestic materials -- notably the iconic mannequin-based sculptures sporting repurposed, poetically deployed clothing cutline appliques, and her evocative paintings of womb-like vintage sewing machines -- she explores both her private family history and her politically salient life experiences, with special regard for her encounters with feminist theory and art-world real politik.
Susan Melly: Waistline
In a studio crit group last year -- along with colleagues Peter Walker and Annie L. Terrazzo -- visiting critic Peter Frank remarked that Melly's work was a "feminist critique -- but not a complaint." Realizing the truth of this -- that it was her nature to examine and express without deconstructing or challenging the dynamics of feminism -- that idea became the spark and the spirit in which she set about convening this group. Together, we built out from that seed guided by the core fact that in terms of politics, popular culture, and art history, presenting representations of the female body as a site for wider examinations of our society, while certainly problematic, remains the paradigm. Examining how the female body occupies both physical and semantic space, one notices the motif of paradox. Women are told, be small, melt in; be strong but soft. They are told, own it, stand out make a statement; but are loved best when they don't take up too much room or too much oxygen with extra flesh and loud voices, criticized for vanity while beauty is ruthlessly demanded of them. Accommodating these frustrating and contradictory messages reinforces the very narrative of deference and weakness that most needs to be challenged.
Susan Melly: Table
Annie L. Terrazzo: Found Object 11
Annie L. Terrazzo is very familiar with this territory of public and private contradictions, and the damaging messages our society sends women and girls -- all the more so in the context of social media, the plague of selfies, and the hypersexualized extremes of fashion industry nonsense. Her unique approach to portraiture involves, references to photography and fantasy, anxiety and subversion -- and her admiration for Peter Pan's ability to detach himself from his own shadow, a power she covets as a matter of allegory and "a playful rejection of the real world. I, unlike Peter, will never escape from my shadow. We can do all these things to our outside to improve...but nothing can change who you wake up with in the morning. Ultimately I wanted to show the relationship between what a woman is and what she is supposed to be, as she pushes to define herself, without hiding."
Annie L. Terrazzo: Mechanical
Peter Walker: Decolletage
For his part, Peter Walker had not been thinking of his work as particularly feminist one way or the other -- but in this context his madly skilled graphite drawings of life-size figures, rendered in hyperreal naturalism but isolated against clean white backgrounds, do ponder issues of identity and interaction in powerful psychological and spatial terms. He depicts both men and women, alone, in groups, and sometimes conjoined like twins, as he examines the tension between our inner and external lives. In making and choosing works for the show Walker is offering work that focuses on the faces of his subjects, in a deliberate move to get closer to the complexities of those interior lives, animated by competing and malleable senses of self.
Peter Walker: Embrace
Carol Sears: Untitled
Carol Sears didn't think of herself as a pointedly feminist artist either, but the inclusion of her dynamic, richly detailed, abstract compositions address a number of salient issues and effects. She herself as a dynamic and adventurous artist, small in stature but muscularly physical in her ambitious scale and intensely expressive drawing, she herself embodies the unapologetic and fearless stance toward constant evolution and risk-taking in self expression. But in specific formal terms, her unique and affecting wielding of large negative spaces in her compositions adds a powerful perspective to the show's idea of occupying space, as well as to a broader, ongoing conversation about abstraction as a narrative method.
Carol Sears: Murrambiji
Victor Wilde: Ordo ab chao
Victor Wilde, as the founder and chief designer of punk couture fashion and lifestyle label Bohemian Society, thinks about how the body -- male, female, trans and androgyne -- moves through space every single day. But unlike a lot of designers, Wilde's approach to both his clothing and fine art practice is more like mixed media assemblage than dressmaking. His hand-finished, conceptually complex designs are on a direct continuum with his sculptures, prints, and performances -- full of narrative symbolism, pointed politics, and personal experience in both medium and message. His combinations of imagery of Americana, gunfire, pop culture, and political farce prove the necessity of addressing fashion as part of any relevant examination of modern feminism. The diptych Camelot, with its pink suit blown to bits and Marilyn-bedecked men's blazer is both wearable and conceptual, furthering the potential of fashion to be as narrative and metaphorical as fine art, if not more so.
Victor Wilde: Camelot (a pussy hair can pull a train and then Jack came)
Lauren Kasmer: Siskiyou (detail)
Lauren Kasmer also works in a hybrid modality of wearables, unconventional materials crossover, gender-bending, and performance, creating photography-based video and sound installations, in which her inspirations refract and diffuse like a conceptual hall of mirrors. Her intimate ensconcements blur boundaries between genres, involving still and moving images, in which photography of the natural world is printed on silk, the silk is both displayed like photographs and also made into garments, models wear the garments as they perform in video works located back out in natural settings of field, forest, mountain, and river. Often models wear the garments inside her multimedia installations, so that artifacts from every stage of this recombinant process contribute to the installation -- involving interaction with actual bodies in the experience of her imagery.
Lauren Kasmer: Siskiyou (detail)
Jeremie Riggleman X Susan Melly: Tribulations of a Torso
The group was further augmented by the inclusion of an arresting collaborative work between Melly and guest artist Jeremie Riggleman, in which he photographed one of her as-yet-unadorned mannequins in an unkempt yard, seeming, though headless, to peer into someone else's home. The photo is then installed and the now-decorated mannequin is shown contemplating the picture surveying her own former exile. It is a powerful punctuation to the overall theme, eloquently expressed, in which these artists seek to notice, examine, quantify and chronicle the current moment in feminism not through lofty deracinated notions, but through painstakingly hand-made objects rich with stark poetry and witty nuance.
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FEMINIST VARIATIONS is open through Monday, September 19, with a special artists and curators talk on Wednesday, September 14, 7-9pm.
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Click to listen to co-curators Susan Melly and Shana Nys Dambrot on KPFK's Feminist Magazine radio show. SOUNDCLOUD.
Loft at Liz's is located at 453 S. La Brea Ave., in Los Angeles.