You Look like A World (10/23/20 - 11/21/20)
You Look Like a World
Curated by Hilary Schaffner
October 23 - November 21
“There are no women artists because a woman is much too much concerned with her own body.” (Paul Goodman, 1951, Lecture at The Club, Manhattan)
You Look Like a World is a playful retort to Goodman’s quote which evinces a fundamental reason why women have been relegated in society: a woman’s body will always be her ultimate concern and limitation. Refuting this in the most direct way, I have chosen five artists, Meghan Brady, Jennie Jieun Lee, Jay Miriam, Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, and Brie Ruais, for whom the body and the female form is a potent resource for creation. Both Meghan and Brie manifest their physical movement onto canvas and clay, respectively. The flattened surfaces of Meghan’s paintings vibrate with activity. The immediacy of Meghan’s brushwork and fragmented geometry subvert the notion of the body as a conduit of perfection, creating her own radiant visual language. In Brie’s sculptures she uses the force of her own bodyweight to mold and shape the eventual forms that explode on the wall with the power of her movement. Using more subtle means, Brie’s paper works incorporate familiar materials such as pulp and hair. When assembled into sculptures, these materials take on a corporal nature. Kimia Kline pulls from personal history and memory as a starting point for her works. In Kimia’s paintings, bodies bleed, brains stand separate from heads, and physical forms are intertwined and indistinguishable from each other, exploring the complex dichotomies of what it means to inhabit our bodies. Both Jennie and Jay find humor and inspiration in distorting the physical form. In Jennie’s paintings and masks one can barely make out the faces of her ceramic counterparts; implying the distortions, misperceptions and facades of the self. Jay’s wit takes hold in her paintings, often depicting her nude protagonists with oversized and exaggerated body parts. Her women work against type-cast definitions of beauty possessing a provocative exuberance.
Meghan Brady
Jennie Jieun Lee
Kimia Kline
Jay Miriam
Brie Ruais
