Becca Albee “Prismataria”

SITUATIONS

This event has ended.

SITUATIONS presents Brooklyn-based artist Becca Albee’s solo exhibition prismataria. Featuring color photographs displayed in a specially designed installation with kinetic light projections and diffused scent, it is the third in a suite of exhibitions exploring the intersection of color theory with feminist practice.

In several of the photographs, Albee has placed color photographic gels, seasonal-color-analysis swatches or color-matching cards, on the pages of textbooks from “Women’s Health & Healing,” a course she took as an undergraduate at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. As she was quoted in Artforum earlier this year, “Its emphasis on grassroots activism and practical self knowledge had a profound impact on me, as I was studying feminist history and was very involved in the riot-grrrl milieu of Olympia.” Each photograph contains a carefully created system to connect and/or highlight the content, color and design – suggesting a revisiting and possibly revising of these urgent materials. One image pictures the dedication page from the book, A New View of a Woman’s Body, a second wave feminist health book, with the dedicatees listed by first name only, a list that reads like a poem.

Other photographs were taken inside the Prismatarium, a large circular room (originally a “ladies’ lounge”) in the Aquatic Park Bathhouse, a building constructed in San Francisco by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. The Prismatarium was designed by Hilaire Hiler, an artist, psychologist, musician, and color theorist. Hiler’s mural in the room begins with a custom color wheel of thirty hues at the center of the ceiling, and it radiates outward, extending down the walls in bands of neutral gray. Some of Albee’s photographs focus on sections of the color wheel mural and she has painted the gallery walls in similar gray bands, extending them even across her photographs’ frames.

Installed on the ceiling of the exhibition space Albee has created a light source – a revolving cylinder with color gels that slowly rotate around the gallery. Based on an unrealized light fixture element of Hiler’s Prismatarium, the fixture bathes the photographs in cyan, magenta, and yellow light. The effect activates her pictures of Hiler’s color wheel and the color elements in her feminist-textbook photos. Instead of using the gels in the traditional way — over the camera lens or flash — Albee has moved them into the space occupied by the viewer. And by refusing to present these textbooks as artifacts, she demonstrates their enduring practical and political value at a moment when feminist clinics are diminishing and healthcare and bodies are under attack.

BECCA ALBEE was born in Portland, ME and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies including MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Blue Mountain Center, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Past shows include solo exhibitions at Et al., San Francisco, CA; 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles; Lump Gallery & Projects, Raleigh, NC; and group exhibitions at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Art in General, Brooklyn, NY; CUE Foundation, New York; CAM, Raleigh, NC; Contemporary Calgary, Alberta. For this exhibition Albee was awarded a PSC-CUNY Research Award and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.