“The New Bitch” Exhibition
Gitana Rosa Gallery
This event has ended.
“The New Bitch: Twilight of the Idols” presents the work of several artists whose work promotes a new feminist ideal of beauty, characterized alternately by use of the painterly figure as a cipher for personification, or as means of depicting hellish scenes that cast a shadow on the dimensions of identity crisis and the human condition as vulnerable or vibrant flesh; tapestries that commingle culturally loaded tropes of female production; sculptures that depict an ambivalence between libidinal pleasure and nightmare; drawings depicting spirit realms in which mythical figures emerging out of pre-Modern American history reflect the need for intimacy with the unknown; photographic portraits of persons connecting to the mysterious gestures construed as related to urban social groups or secret societies. Each of these artists envelops us in a different expression, but all of them comprehend and appreciate what it means to be a ‘bitch,’ an idiosyncratically transgressive force for change operating at the edge of human knowledge.
Gregory Jacobsen is a painter attracted to the viscera of erupted flesh. He revels in an exploration of the contemporary grotesque, depicting figures that remind us of the teeming masses of demons and victims in the hellish works of Bosch or Bruegel. Between the depraved and the ridiculous yawns a continuous effort to draw out the innate vulnerability of the human condition, which is contained in the body itself, and which Jacobsen exposes to the raw and honest light of day.
Katie Cercone operates as a performative anthropologist of urban street culture, melding it with lesbian and feminist agendas, and mixing in a dash of attitude and joie de vivre. Her mix and match aesthetic is inspired by pop music icons, fashion, and using spontaneous dance interventions, or flash mobs on a small scale, aided by video, to establish a presence in the youthful scene of art.
Christina Dallas mines the subconscious related to simple gestures that connect everyone, from the sign for ‘Okay’ to arms crossed over one’s chest, to hands held apart while weaving strings to reveal a mystical truth through the design of knots, braids, and tangles. All of her figures are women, posed as familiars to a spirit or as diviners of immortal truth.
Dawn Frasch’s paintings depict a menagerie of frothy yet visceral romps that alternate between sexual ecstasy and physical rending of skin and organs. They are structured and loaded as metaphors for womanly crisis, creating a radical palimpsest of gore, yet always leaving the eyes and faces, gestures and emotions intact, so that amid all the scenic action we can still see these as people who suffer, and not as metaphors without dimension.
Michele Basora’s paintings investigate dimensions of personification as a dynamic actively at work in the creative endeavor of portraiture. She eschews the specifics ordinarily at the service of portrayal of known persons in favor of summoning a deep spirit that emanates from blow the surface of her support, whether canvas or paper. They are accompanied by elements of setting, nature, dress, pose, and mood, and the presence of animals or birds as familiars, foils, or additions to the theme of presence, alien but vibrant, into all of which the spectator can endlessly peer.
Elisa Garcia de la Huerta creates tapestries of feminine inspired imagery operate as mandalas, sacred geometries that include references to nature and weaving. Her attraction is to a ‘raw and imperfect materiality…layered by the history of soft remnant materials.’ Garcia traces and question the boundaries of genre, using strategies such as color drawing gestures, layering, concealment, juxtaposition and projection to understand intimacy as a degree of experience, relationships and domesticity; always commenting on the performativity of gender and sexual identity. **
Rebecca Goyette is intimately engaged with models of historical, natural, biological, and mythical interpretation of the subconscious and how archetypes and libidinal aggression likewise answer to unspoken needs for intimacy and dramatic self-expression.
Heine Koh’s sculptures reference the body as metaphors for ecstasy and affliction. Playful and fanciful yet vaguely foreboding, they suggest sites of crisis or tiny monsters that are contained in or provide a necessary function for each of us: a vulva-like form projecting from the wall is covered with tiny fluorescent blisters that turn out to be fragments of blue broken glass; a huge pair of red lips with a freckled section of burnt points stands upon silvery spikes for legs or tentacles, and the work itself seems to want to eat or kiss us but we are afraid despite how pretty Koh has attempted to make it look. Is it a metaphor for temptation or a nightmarish confluence of desire and danger?
Media
Schedule
from September 04, 2014 to October 04, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-09-04 from 18:00 to 21:00