Female artists explicitly express desire, fantasy, disappointment and pleasure
We may be the inheritors of twentieth-century feminisms, yet the continued objectification of young girls and women remains devastating and oppressive. Despite the protests and critiques shaped by two generations of thinkers, activists and image- makers, mainstream culture continues to enforce the notion of dichotomous gender. Double standards, as well as double entendres, are the stock-in-trade of television programming, prevalent humor, dominant cinema and insidious advertising.
The young artists whose work comprises COME ON: Desire Under the Female Gaze seek to present desire as a polymorphous experience. They reject the use of their nude bodies, a foundational strategy frequently employed in feminist art since the 1960s. Instead, they direct our focus to the performance of looking and at the objects of their gaze. Rachel Rampelman's video calls attention to the gross imbalance between the cultural championing of male debauchery and the repudiation of female promiscuity. Juliet Jacobson's drawings depict the mythic blurring of physical, emotional and spiritual thresholds transgressed by subjects in love. Jo-Anne Balcaen's sculpture and language-based work unveil the commoditization of desire as simply cheap, seductive materials and socially scripted feelings.
COME ON presents unabashed explorations and unapologetic articulations of female libido. It encourages us to widen our notions of acceptable behavior for women and girls, and to expand our tolerance for images of sexualized, passive males. This exhibition is a response to both the barrage of sexually "available" female figures and to the rejection of queer and eroticized male imagery in mass media.
The title of the exhibition, COME ON, works in a number of ways: it can be read as a dismissive phrase, referring to the way the female gaze and empowered female sexuality are often discounted; and, simultaneously, as encouragement, invitation, goad, proposition, incitement. Ultimately, COME ON aspires to open up radical possibilities of pleasure.
Curatorial Statement by Astria Suparak
Download full PDF press release here.
ABOUT THE ARTWORK AND ARTISTS
In Poison, by Brooklyn artist Rachel Rampleman, rock star virility is deflated through real-life testimonial. In a video viewable from a set of stadium bleachers, the artist's sister Sarah describes her lifelong idolatry of infamous front-man Bret Michaels. The fantasy and anticipation leading up to a weekend rendezvous are recounted in uproarious detail, as well as her ensuing disappointment in the desired object's sexual skills. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes, "Sarah is brilliant" and artnet calls the video "priceless". Rampleman's report punctures the myth of the adoring, anonymous female fan and the prowess of the famous musician.
Rampleman has exhibited and screened at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Cynthia Broan Gallery and NYU Cantor Film Center in Manhattan, and ArtWorks Time Warner Cable Gallery in Cincinnati.
Montreal-based Jo-Anne Balcaen creates oblique narratives with dictionary definitions through intriguing juxtapositions. The word combinations chosen question the cultural baggage assigned to language used to express emotions, uncovering the role of language in the construction of gender. In addition to the text works in COME ON, Balcaen will install a suggestive minimalist sculpture created out of balloons, which points to the commercialization of courtship, the inflated and insupportable expectations of happiness, and the temporality of feelings.
Balcaen has exhibited at SAW Gallery in Ottawa, Katharine Mulherin in Toronto, in Montreal at Parisian Laundry, Joyce Yahouda, articule, and the Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University, as well as unconventional sites like Salvation Army, an abandoned hospital, a library and on billboards.
Brooklyn-based Juliet Jacobson's large-scale drawings evoke centuries-old Mannerist painting through the use of ornate details, contorted compositions and irrational space. These exquisite illustrations of intertwined male lovers are informed by the critical theories of feminist and queer studies. With a symbol set deriving from the histories of art, religion, and literature, Jacobson's finely rendered works are meditations upon generation and creativity, fragility, intimacy, love, mutuality, morality, identity, alienation and universality.
Jacobson has been included in exhibitions curated by Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond in New York and Rupert Goldsworthy in London. Her work was featured in the last issue of K48 Magazine.
RELATED EVENTS
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Artist Talk at Warehouse Community Classroom: |
Jacobson Sept. 20, 2007 2pm | Rampleman Sept. 20, 2007 3pm |
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Receptions at The Warehouse Gallery: |
Artists' Reception Sept. 20, 2007 5-8pm |
Th3 reception Oct. 18, 2007 5-8pm |
| Film screenings: |
Daughter's of Joy at Spark Art Space Aug. 26, 2007 8—9:30pm Download press release here. Co-presented with Syracuse Experimental Film & Media Workshop |
Emotional Realism at Watson Theater Oct. 18, 2007 8—9pm Download press release here. Videos that pose questions about the rhetoric of honesty and the production of empathy in the viewer. Curated by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby with work by Miriam Bäckström, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Dena DeCola and Karin Wandner, and Amanda Baggs. |