“Vocabulary” Exhibition
Soho20 Chelsea Gallery
[Image: Nancy Rodrigo "Red, white, and Blue" (2018)]
This event has ended.
SOHO20 presents its 2019 annual group exhibition, Vocabulary, featuring drawings, paintings, photographs, and mixed-media works by members Darla Bjork, Elizabeth Bisbing, Eve Ingalls, Susan Hockaday, Lucy Hodgson, Nancy Rodrigo, Kathy Stark, Gayle Tanaka, and Eleonora Tammes.
In her indescribably present poem from 1996, “Responding,” Juliana Spahr proffers:
“the question here is the same as that of a relationship
where does art define Vocabulary?
the margin declares
[it is impossible to speak about something
it is only possible to speak beside it…”
What is it to concern oneself with a ‘something?’
For over forty-five years as one of the oldest women’s collectives, SOHO20 has concerned itself with the something of feminism. By what and whose definition(s) do we speak / have we spoken / will we speak about / beside / by means or spite of, such?
While explicitly these are not the questions that the nine artists in Vocabulary ask, their works, notably exhibited within the context of a historic feminist space, are an offering of many somethings.
To share this space encourages conversations amongst the works. Select, for instance, a hyperbolic hand waving eerily (of Lucy Hodgson’s drawings); let it speak to Nancy Rodrigo’s ghostly skeleton losing its shadow inside a figure, a seeming reversal of Carolee Schneeman’s famed performance. From the collaged petals of an domestic geranium (Elizabeth Bisbing) wander to a photographed leaf intermingling with recycled materials and detritus (Susan Hockaday). So too one may construct dialogues from among the others. Individually the works speak of individual somethings: together they elicit conversation.
In the studio, Amsterdam, 1982. Image courtesy of Eleonora Tammes.
In conjunction with Vocabulary is Studio, an installation of images from the past four decades of the SOHO20 members and community, demarcating the divers definitions of this term.
Me trying to align my phone’s shadow with that of my dad’s. Excerpt from and here, 2018.
Katie Giritlian: Evening Workshop
Rethinking Feminism 2019
January 24, 7PM
Katie Giritlian will lead an evening workshop that invites participants to consider imaginary archives: ones that they wish existed but do not, or ones that do exist but have for some reason—personal or institutional—been rendered inaccessible.
This workshop is part of the new season of programming organized by SOHO20’s 2018–2019 curatorial fellow, Mira Dayal, as part of Rethinking Feminism.
Media
Schedule
from January 04, 2019 to February 02, 2019
Opening Reception on 2019-01-04 from 18:00 to 21:00