February 4 – March 27, 2010

Featured artists:
Katherine Behar, New York | Amber Boardman, New York | Milana Braslavsky, Baltimore | Kate Hers, Berlin/LA | Susan Lee-Chun, Miami | Noelle Mason, Tampa | Shana Moulton, Brooklyn | Renetta Sitoy, Bay Area, CA | Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Baltimore | Amber Hawk Swanson, New York | Stacia Yeapanis, Chicago | Saya Woolfalk, New York

Event Schedule

February 4: Opening Talks and Reception

4pm LY Artists and Curators Present the Project

5:00 – 8:00 pm Reception and Gallery Talk

March 6: 2-5pm Contemporary Art and the Internet

Stacia Yeapanis Talk | Copyright Workshop with Maryland Lawyers for the Arts

March 18: 6-8pm Susan Lee-Chun Artist Talk and Public Art Demonstration

Losing Yourself in the 21st Century is a unique online curatorial project to be presented in a gallery exhibition and a series of public events at Maryland Art Place from February 4 to March 27, 2010. The exhibition features new work by young U.S. based women artists exploring the idea of “self” in the 21st century. Their projects reveal how new media, information systems and consumer culture encourage personal expression at the same time they diffuse our sense of self and control our behavior. The artists alternately embrace, critique and transcend contemporary female identity.

Collaborative curators Cathy Byrd, Executive Director, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore; Susan Richmond, Contemporary Art Historian, Georgia State University Welch School of Art and Design; and Jillian Hernandez, Ph.D. Candidate in Women’s Studies, Rutgers University, developed the project and selected participating artists through this site.

Dear Artists,
Thank you all for your participation on the project thus far. It’s been exciting for us!

We’re pleased to announce the artists selected for the exhibitions to take place in Atlanta at Georgia State University’s Welch School Gallery (October-November 2009) and in Baltimore at Maryland Art Place (January-March 2010).

Please check back here for details on the exhibition and event schedule.

Katherine Behar
Amber Boardman
Milana Braslavsky
Estherka Projekt
Susan Lee-Chun
Noelle Mason
Shana Moulton
Ali Prosch
Renetta Sitoy
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum
Amber Hawk Swanson
Saya Woolfalk
Stacia Yeapanis

Meanwhile, the site has created a life of its own! We encourage you to continue posting on losingyourself.com, and look forward to hearing from you.

Our best,

Cathy, Susan and Jillian

It’s official: losingyoursef.com now has a life of its own. And your curators have just begun to turn over in our minds the conceptual connectivity emerging on the site.

Susan has compared the work of artists who center on their rapport with the natural world. Jillian discovered patterns in how some artists examine facets of selfhood and how others critique the traditionally feminine. And I’ve been thinking about projects in which the artists purposefully mediate a range of psychological, emotional and sexual experiences.

In her video document of the performance Devour, for example, Cindy Rehm captures an oddly erotic moment shared by three women passing an orange back and forth without using their hands. The ambiguous characters enact their ritual privately, inside a domestic space. In contrast, Estherka Projekt’s Noh-Chim (Missing) represents a social intervention. Her video documents a young Korean woman’s search for her identity. The quest takes place in different public settings that expose the woman’s acute sense of alienation and loss.

Amber Hawk Swanson grounds her performance installations and videos in the sexual, using her surrogate self—a life-sized doll in her likeness—as a public victim. Amber says her Amber Doll Project examines issues of power and permission in the objectification of women. With the allure of a sex toy, the doll has appeared on “Sex TV,” at tailgate parties and in other situations where she submits to physical abuse.

Both Amber Swanson and Lily McElroy describe their work as feminist. However, Lily takes on the role of aggressor in her public acts. Documented in photographs, her performance is decidedly friendlier, albeit still confrontational. She first asks permission, then literally throws herself at men in bars, subverting typical predator/prey relationships.

Khadijah Queen, likewise the subject of her own work, uses both photography and video to record her performance of raw emotions in intimate settings. In a recent interactive narrative, she embodied rage, sorrow and suspicion. Ali Prosch deliberately channels anguish in an abandoned theatrical space. The performer on stage in Polyphony endlessly emits a high-pitched scream. Though the venue appears empty, she is rewarded for her honest expression with a continuous volley of roses.

Less visceral perhaps, but equally intriguing are two projects that evoke or draw directly from television. Shana Moulton presents her whimsical drama Whispering Pines in a series of episodes. As she plays with the insecurities of her comical character, she exposes a range of emotions typically tied to adolescence and shares her delight in the absurdity of low-brow handicrafts. Stacia Yeapanis produces video collages with select excerpts from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and Charmed that transform their central characters into feminist icons. Her cross-stitched close-ups drawn from those same pop shows transpose digital images by way of traditional needlework into contemporary emotional signifiers.

Amber Boardman’s work is both contemplative and personal. She mediates relationships between women through video narratives spun from text messages, voice mail and her own musical compositions. Textual Healing and I Wish I Could See You reveal how digital communications can carry considerable emotion. The slight disconnect that follows the trail of messages provokes a psychological dis-ease that is no easier to shake than that elicited by more dramatic concepts.

- Cathy

To follow up on Susan’s illuminating discussion of how issues of the natural world are being explored by many of you I’d like to center on how issues of identity and stereotypes are being engaged on losingyourself.com.

Proliferating Selves

Susan Lee Chun and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum complicate the notion of a stable, singular “self” in their work by creating alter egos. Susan Lee Chun’s “When Sue Met Sioux” is a narrative consisting of two characters the artist situates in absurd and surreal environments. The installation project consists of sculptures of headless young women in plaid school uniforms. The uniform has figured persistently in Chun’s work as a vehicle for exploring issues of assimilation and the “standardization” of subjectivity.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum explores hybrid and transnational identities in “A Short History: Starring Asme as Herself.” The video features three incarnations of an alter ego named Asme who communicate by blowing and inhaling an ethereal cloud of air through their mouths. Asme has a dynamic relationship with the lush landscape. Her travels through the land affect her subjectivity and result in the spawning of multiple selves. Hybrid identities are also a focus of Donna Huanca’s work that is informed by the personal mythologies and spiritual practices of her Korean and Bolivian background.

Girlhood & Domesticity

The traditional femininity embodied in the “pretty” pink dresses that often appear in the work of Alison Ward sharply contrast with the aggression and hyper-consumption that occur in her performances such as “The Birthday Girl” and “Boxing for Mr. Wonderful.” Katie Hovencamp’s installation work also destabilizes the representations of femininity found in fairy tales that continue to inform how gender is performed by girls today (e.g. the popular Disney Princess products and media).

A 1973 Barbie townhouse is the backdrop of Jenifer K Wofford’s “Townhouse Trilogy” that explores how interior spaces and daily routines structure female subjectivity. The characters in Wofford’s video perform against the backdrop of the dollhouse and are engaged in absurd and compulsive rituals such as spell checking and walking around clutching cups of coffee.

Domestic settings also appear in Yoon Cho’s “Nuclear Family Series.” A response to the pressures on the artist and her husband to have a child after moving to the suburbs, the work consists of a holiday greeting card sent to friends that depicts the couple conducting household chores. The images are superimposed with silhouettes of babies and toys. “Nuclear Family Series” stages the construction of a normative family “unit,” which entails the consolidation of male and female subjectivities in addition to that of the gender-less, yellow-hued infant.

Handcrafted domestic objects are sold for professional advancement in Vadis Turner’s “Dowry” project. Turner abandons the customary function of the dowry as a commodity that facilitates marriage and utilizes it instead as a vehicle for personal profit. The Mail Order Bride performers turn a profit by making a spectacle out of wedding ceremonies. M.O.B. engages with stereotypes of Filipina women as sexual and domestic laborers by advertising their services as bridesmaids-for-hire who can weep on call during the nuptials and provide emotional support for the bride-to-be.

Gender-in-Text

Constructions of gender are primarily advanced through representations of the body in visual culture. We have discussed how artists like Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Alison Ward trouble notions of subjectivity and gender through their representations of embodied women. In the work of Renetta Sitoy and Nora Herting, however, text is the vehicle through which issues of identity are engaged.

Nora Herting embroiders women’s underwear with statements revealing moments of self-doubt and insecurity such as “I have an unfortunate face.” Renetta Sitoy’s video “The Truth About Boys and Girls” consists of computer-generated text appearing on a dark screen. The truisms about gender that are listed, such as “Girls like to be chased after” and “Boys like to read good things” are vocalized electronically. The artist culled the phrases from a Google search in which she typed “girls like to” and “boys like to” into the field. The results reveal how the identities of women are persistently constructed through notions of physical attractiveness and providing sexual pleasure for men whereas men are framed as being interested in reading and other “productive” activities.

–Jillian

]]> http://www.losingyourself.com/message-from-the-curators-ctd-2/feed/ 5 http://www.losingyourself.com/message-from-the-curators-ctd/ http://www.losingyourself.com/message-from-the-curators-ctd/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 13:38:00 +0000 Patricia Lacrete http://www.losingyourself.com/?p=1138

Dear All,

It’s been illuminating to see the themes emerge among the posted works. Some of the connections appeared immediately to us, while others have developed more slowly and at times, imperceptibly. There are most likely others that we’ve not yet identified. In any case, it is making for some lively curatorial conversations. What follows are some brief observations on one of the more prominent motifs: the natural world.

Several of you have developed strong bodies of work around and in nature. One of the first to post on the site, Shana Robbins traveled to Iceland in order to stage private rituals and performances in its remote landscape. Shana’s interest in merging with animals and plants speaks of a desire to reclaim lost connections between human and natural realms, and she has drawn on a number of non-Western cultural and spiritual concepts to aid this union.

In similar fashion, Jenny Kendler and Molly Schafer have produced images that express a desire for new modes of interrelationality with the natural world. Jenny has identified an important theoretical and ethical framework in this context: the feminine sublime. Premised on the notion of respect for alterity, the feminine sublime describes a way of “being in the world” that dovetails with Karen Cleveland’s art. Karen has provocatively blurred the boundaries between site- and studio-based works, using performance, photography and painting to express notions of intimacy and connection.

In very different ways, Marisa Dipaola and Julia Oldham have literally assumed the perspective of the natural world: Marisa through her temporary occupation of a bear cave, and Julia with her embodiment of insect rituals. Julia’s observation, that her performances represent meditations on the fantasy that humans and invertebrates have a shared set of experiences has a lot in common with Saya Woolfalk’s (1, 2) complex narrative work. Saya’s empathics inhabit a utopian world in which everything and anything is possible.

A counterpoint to these perspectives, Jessica Westbrook’s art refers to artificial constructs of nature, from synthetic food substitutes to faux natural environments. Jessica raises a critical point about how our perceptions and valuations of the natural world are often culturally mediated. How, she tacitly asks, can we reconnect with the “real” natural world? Does it even exist?

Cheers,
Susan

Dear Artists,

Writing to say that we’re thrilled about your engagement with this site. Thank you for presenting your work here, and thank you, too, for continuing to share the opportunity with your own artist networks.

We’re considering some of the themes that have emerged—the significance of nature, ritual, women’s work, relationships, stereotypes and sexuality, among them—as we contemplate which ensemble to select for the exhibition.

Of note: The exhibition is now set to travel from Atlanta to Baltimore. Additional venues are still under consideration.

In the coming week, we’ll be posting a series of observations that give a view into our curatorial process. We look forward to sharing our evolving perceptions of how Losing Yourself might take shape in real space and time, and intend to post our final selections by mid-June.

Please join us in this conversation by adding your comments and do keep posting your projects!

Our best regards,

Cathy, Susan and Jillian