Launch Friday 19th September, 6-8pm | Saturday and Sunday 20th & 21st September 11-5pm | Other hours by appointment
LA WOMAN
Artists: Claudia Bucher, Stacy Henning, Rachael Neubauer, Mary Anna Pomonis, Cindy Rehm, Allison Stewart, Elizabeth Withstandley, Julie Zemel
HAUNTED
A video program by Craftswoman House featuring artists: Ursula Brookbank, Min Choi, Anne Colvin, Micol Hebron, Nina Lassila, Elizabeth Leister, Shana Robbins and Alberto Roman, Simone Stoll, Tracy Abbott Szatan and Marisa Williamson.
LA woman is a group exhibition featuring the work of several female artists from Los Angeles, California. The works included in this show explore some of the ways women engage in the physical and cultural landscape of a city now considered by some sources to be the most culturally diverse city in the history of the world. The works included range from personal meditations to more overt political statements and investigate many of the concerns of Southern Californians from the exquisite, volatile landscape to the glitter of Hollywood.
Various themes emerge from a viewing of the collected works. Through collage, painting, video, and photography, many of the artists present fragmented images of the self or environment. Like the passing of cars on the freeway, the viewer has time to focus briefly on a detail of hair, a passing email, the blue sky, or a line of text, but only for a lovingly focused moment. Others filter anxiety and escapist fantasies through technology. Survivalist skills and utopian dreams hardwire their way into reality. Not to be ignored, the Entertainment Industry makes itself visible on the glittering surface of a sculpture or in a mother’s studio portrait of her child.
Fortunately, echoes of the Feminist Art Moment of the 1970’s still resound in the hills of Southern California with voices that demand to be heard. The included feminist video program, “Haunted”, makes clear the vitality of the new wave of artists invested in women’s issues and the right to express their experience in their own way.
Defining the LA Woman may be an impossible task, but lingering on her differences is surely a pleasure.
Curator Elizabeth Cheatham Wild
This exhibition at Marrickville Garage is an exchange with “sister” garage space Winslow Garage, an artist run space in Silverlake, Los Angeles. Established by artist Elizabeth Cheatham Wild, Winslow Garage has been running since 2002, showing local and international contemporary art.
Marrickville Garage has been greatly influenced by Winslow Garage’s domestic location, and how social utility generates at the intersection of exhibition, yard, house and the public/private zone blending between the public street and the domestic garage.
HAUNTED program:
Throughout history, creative works by women have often been devalued, dismissed, and even buried. While women’s contributions to art and culture have been more visible in recent years, blind spots still exist. Feminist art of the 1970s serves as a profound antecedent to contemporary art, but rich bodies of feminist work are barely acknowledged in discussions on current art practices including relational aesthetics and the prevalent use of informal and domestic materials. The artists in Haunted explore the hollows of history, to wake ghosts and channel hidden voices. These artists express a fluid exchange between the body and memory through a focus on tactile experience, manifestations of the repressed female body, and an emphasis on process as a means to capture the immaterial. Read more about this video program from Craftswoman House here.
HM.GDN.1
Ursula Brookbank
1:47
HM.GDN.1 and HM.GDN.3, 2007-2008 are from a series of videos created for the Viralnet.net collective project called Home and Garden, a web based curatorial initiative. The two videos combine voice by Bette Burgoyne and sound by amk ( for HM.DN.3 ) to conjure secret domestic spaces and their feminine occupants.
Rain
Simone Stoll
1:30
Rain is an imaginary walk on a tightrope, a two-layered poetic video in shades of grey with rhythmic sound of drops colliding.
Piiskaa!
Nina Lassila
1:13
In Piiskaa!/Beat it! we see a woman cleaning a carpet. There is something provocative about a physical woman; even a loud laugh can provoke some people. There is a prevailing notion that a loud physical woman is somehow deranged; out of control.
Love Letter for a Girl
Min Choi
7:30
Love Letter for a Girl explores the relationship between girls and their desires within the spectatorship of blog culture. The camera views a reflective monitor, with scrolling images collected from online apparel shops and blogs. The ambiguous relationship between the female narrator and images of girls reflects women’s ambivalent position both as objects and subjects of desire.
Miss Calpurnia
Anne Colvin
1:14
A simple structuralist film where the editing process – the change of speed, direction, repetition, jump cuts, residual sound and color shifts – become the film-time and the film- image. Stripped bare, a re-filmed and deconstructed fragment allows the simple act of chasing after a scarf in the wind to build into a visual score.
Vista
Elizabeth Leister
4:54
Vista traverses invisible dangers in the seeming innocence of nature and offers simultaneously claustrophobic and protected spaces. The camera traces a path through a confined labyrinth, while on the soundtrack a woman whispers a poem by a Dutch mystic that envisions what it would be like to occupy a vast space. Threat and possibility coexist in the sounds of a body running, a momentary picture of possibly infinite space, and the artist’s reading of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
Angry Feminist
Micol Hebron
2:14
Angry Feminist is a video composed of only texts. This video is a sequence of alternating phrases from four sources: clichés about feminism; famous feminist slogans and quotes; stereotypical phrases exchanged between two lovers or ex-lovers; statements that artists make about their creative process.
HM.GDN.3
Ursula Brookbank
1:30
Black Dinner Party
Marisa Williamson
4:19
This work features youtube video footage of activist, Angela Davis, entertainer and philanthropist, Oprah Winfrey, and pop star, Beyonce Knowles.
Lucid Risings
Shana Robbins & Alberto Roman
1: 49
Lucid Rising uses Phantasmaphysics to dislodge the distinction between materiality and immateriality. Before meaning and coherence arise, a secret exchange between human embodiment and the earth takes place that gives rise to both through veiled nuptials.
Woman Pacing
Nina Lassila
1:23
We see a pair of feet moving rapidly back and forth over a floor, as a voiceover talks about an artist woman who has issues with her artistic work.
Ambrosia
Tracy Abbott Szatan
2:52
Ambiguously received is the ambrosial dawn, the transformation, the delight and solemnity offered. In Greek mythology, ambrosia is a drink, food or perfume of the Gods, granting immortality to the individual who receives it. In Ambrosia, a figure moves between and across landscapes, physical, psychological and emotional states, dissolves into and is reconstituted by and from them.
Marrickville Garage 