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David Castillo Gallery: The Continuing Adventures of our Heroine - 11 Oct 2008 to 1 Nov 2008 Current Exhibition |
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The Continuing Adventures of our Heroine Opening Reception Saturday, October 11, 7-10 pm October 11- November 1, 2008 David Castillo Gallery is proud to present Continuing Adventures of our Heroine. The heroine of this all-woman group exhibition includes Susan Lee Chun, Francie Bishop Good, Natalya Laskis, Lee Materazzi, Cindy Sherman, Jaimie Warren, and Michelle Weinberg. Natalya Laskis, Lee Materrazzi, and Francie Bishop Good manipulate ordinary objects and spaces. These artists examine how contemporary women assign significance and emotion in an age beyond that of Valerie Solanas, when establishing recognition and power as a feminist, female, or effeminate artist entailed simply and singularly shooting Andy Warhol. Laskis, Materrazzi, and Good remind the viewer that to be a woman-- and more importantly, to be human-- means an acquisition of varying degrees of passivity and chaos, comeliness and wretchedness, creativity and dysfunction, youth and maturity, femininity and masculinity. Michelle Weinberg creates an evolving landscape of contemporary folklore punctuated by vehicles of communication: text messages, billboards, and commercial signage. Through abstract image and words, sublimity and narration, the natural world and constructed reality, Weinberg tailors chance into an aestheticism harkening to her personal experience growing up female in the 60s and 70s. Susan Lee Chun's inherited Korean and American identities tint the lens through which she perceives her experience as a woman, finding as little authenticity in race and ethnicity as Weinberg does in women's traditional roles. In You are cordially invited to tea time, an installation/performance, viewers may drink tea together. The act references the domestic sphere, traditional Asian tea ceremonies, and Judy Chicago's feminist landmark, The Dinner Party. Sharing tea in a gallery-- like eating Rirkrit Tiravanija's infamous Thai cuisine-- destines participants to bifurcate but never leave the table. Like Nikki Lee, Jaimie Warren stages her physical form within scenes of conspicuous or cult identities presumably far removed from her own anima. In Warren's photographs, as around Chun's tea table, a woman's essence is misplaced in the metaphysics of personal and collective identity. As Leigh Bowery's avant-garde fashion and performance sensibilities suggested, appearance can sometimes be everything-- certainly more than isolated sex, gender, or experience. Cindy Sherman has long been hailed the queen of masquerade. Masquerade is not new to women, familiar with altering, unleashing, and subjugating identities in order to participate in "men's work." Seen in conjunction with the rest of The Continuing Adventures of our Heroine, the gruesome corpse or doll-like artifice with which Sherman presents herself should awaken not remorse, but certainty of Sherman's exponential multiplication as a woman, an artist, and citizen of a lived-in world. |
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