RE-FORM
Curated by Rebecca Drolen
RE-FORM explores the body as a site for improvisation, collage, and play.
These multi-disciplinary artists mix irony and the surreal to question outward appearances and the ideals of bodily performance. To dismantle and reimagine the body presents a physical struggle but also offers the freedom to reconstruct alternatives with a new agency, defiance, and power. While this work imagines the body as a flexible space - open to change and reorganization, it also sees art practice and tactile media as malleable and subject to impropriety and play. The work in Re-Form seeks to question and prod at the limits of the body as it brings a sense of wonder toward accessing the unknowable or impossible beneath the surface.
Lauren Flaaen
@laurenflaaen
Nailed - Oil, nails and doorknobs on canvas, 22" x 28" x 9", 2020, $350
My practice is committed to this form of rebellious resilience, maintaining humanity as it heals from our current and historical wounds. It is a celebration of primordial desire of intimacy and connectivity as a form of empowerment. However painful it is to acknowledge that I am citizen of this world, I must navigate a thriving existence that denounces the brutal flaws of humanity. I paint and construct the body as a symbol of human life, the universal experience of occupying flesh. The body is uncovered and engulfed in a wave of vulnerability. They become moments suspended in time, impenetrable from harm. This tenderness is retaliation against the exploitive and abusive violence of our culture. I manipulate the scale and arrangement of body parts disorienting the view to a new distorted landscape. The forms are exacerbated until they become obnoxious. This obscurity opens up a place to expose the psychological wounds of humanity’s violent propensities as the bodies call out and claim their existence. In contrast to tenderness, disjointed female body parts and building materials quench an exhibition of rage. This agitation confronts the lack of agency of bodies in the expansive universe of Eurocentric male dominance. I release the constraints of the body as I detach and rebuild the parts, resisting the invisibility, singularity and solitude of motherhood.
Angel Grace King
@sleepismyrival
Peanut Butter Palace - black and white 35mm film and digital collage, 36 x 36 inches, 2018, $600 each
Peanut Butter Palace is a series of 3 photographs that combine black and white 35 mm film with digital collage. Through the uncanny, these photographs play the female form. The hands, feet and the body become disjointed through use of props and collage. Through superimposing bodies onto bodies with unlikely props, it poses themes of memory, trauma, with sensuality and fetish culture.
Amy Reidel
@amy.reidel
From the Mombie series (Turtleneck Two-face, verso) - acrylic, glitter, oil on glazed stoneware with custom decal backdrop, 6" x 5" x 2", 2021, $500
Blue Cling - mixed media on paper, 11 x 15", 2021, $350
From the Mombie series (Cling 3) - acrylic, glitter, oil on glazed stoneware with custom decal backdrop, 5" x 3" x 2", 2021, $400,
Through painting, drawing and sculpture, I abstractly combine imagery to illuminate the bittersweet conditions of motherhood, family and sexuality; topics most people experience but are not encouraged to discuss professionally. The innocuous, inherited patterns of Grandma’s scarves and decorative rugs merge together with darling babies and scared caregivers in an absurd representation of home and love.
My work results from a cacophonous use of materials, layering and erasure, which have become my primary language as a progressive mother in the conservative Heartland. Personal and political issues conflate in my work and result in aggressive but candy-colored marks reflecting the dualities of fear and joy, rejection and protection. The saturated spectrum is used as a defense mechanism to make magic of this earthly existence.
Annie May Johnston
@anniemayjohnston
Flavor on my breath - trace monotype on paper, wax crayon, plaster monotype, 22 x 30, 2021, $1500
Crying peach hair - trace monotype on paper, wax crayon, plaster monotype, 22 x 30, 2021, $1500
Milkteeth - trace monotype on paper, wax crayon, plaster monotype, 22 x 30, 2021, $1500
The work from this show explores recursion and memory through print in an investigation of dreamscapes and the imagination. These works exist in that moment of taking the last step, anticipating the end of the stairs, but being confronted by one more. And falling… the body propels, weight shifts, and there is confusion about existence--a shift between reality and expectation akin to sleepwalking or walking through a hedge maze.
When sleepwalking, coexisting occurs. A coexisting within a space where sound and language become one, where the inside and the outside of the body integrates and where the watchful third eye stalks the curious tongue. These works serve as portals into the internal, contradictory world where nightmares and daydreams meet at one wavering horizon.
Just as prints hold the memory of the mark that came before it, bodies hold the memory of muscle movement: inks spit, lick, and exchange fluids. Serving as a throughway point for the dreamworld, the mouth sets the stage for the mind and internal body’s waving peristalsis. Communication within these dreamscapes is packaged by the smell of breath, moments of confusion or pause, and layered bodily moments on display. Here, memory and flesh meet in an oscillation between reality and abstraction, nightmares and daydreams.
Jaclyn Wright
@jaclynrwright
Birthmark, II (cut-out) - Dye sublimation print on aluminum, latex paint, wood, 20" x 26" x 24", 2018, NSF
Untitled, I (in-camera masking) - 4x5 color positive film, Archival inkjet print, 24" x 30", 2019, NSF
Opaque Bodies, I - Video stills, Archival inkjet prints, 20" x 52", 2019, NSF
"Marked" combines traditional photographic techniques with contemporary digital processes, performance, and sculpture. The title refers to a prominent birthmark on my neck, which has drawn verbal and physical abuse from strangers. Reproductions of the birthmark’s shape and color appear throughout the work. In "Marked", I consider ways we are marked from birth. Birthmarks are like political boundaries on a map, expressing the desire to include and exclude, to mark belonging through exclusion and differentiation. The work explores the parallels between patriarchal attempts to subjugate and exploit the land and the body. This is visualized through the demarcation of the birthmark to represent what is through what isn’t.
Maryalice Carroll
@maryalicecarroll_
The Funfetti Effect - Ceramic, 24x18x30, 2021, $850.00
Feeling all the feelings affects the body not only mentally, but physically. I am interested in what happens to the body when we are emotionally overwhelmed with feelings. Tears might fall from our eyes and they might mix with sweat oozing out of our pores. I consider myself an extremely emotional person and have recently been hyper-aware of my body’s reaction. When I feel overwhelmed, my skin heats up, feels like it is going to crawl away, and I can feel every sweat droplet. My emotions are escaping my body and that is what I attempt to emulate in my current body of work.
Sky Maggiore
@skymaggiore
Untitled (Chest/Trap) - Digital Photographs, 20x25in, 2019/2021, $550
ICD10 Code F64.0 (Medical Garment) - Looped Projection mapped video and hand-sewn medical garment, 2020, NFS
My practice questions aspects of social, political and medical systems that were not constructed to consider bodies and minds outside of the gender binary, and with that considers trans and gender non-conforming (TGNC) health and wellness. I contemplate intervention, evidence, transition, perception and care as they relate to myself personally and to those who share similar experiences. I employ multiple mediums in my studio including video, projection mapping, hand-sewing, photography and printmaking, along with experimenting in virtual spaces as a site for intervention.
Christina Santner
@tinasantamo
Revision, A History of the Body - Cyanotype, embroidery thread, graphite on tracing paper, coffee, 25.25” x 39”, 2018 - 2020, $850
The cyanotypes used to make this piece were originally made in 2018, which was asking questions about how trauma leaves impressions on the body and can be passed down and inherited. During the Covid-19 lockdown, I returned to these images to deconstruct them and re-make my body once again, asking new questions about the ways in which our bodies are compositions and collages of all those who came before us. The ongoing pandemic has raised new questions and anxieties for all of us - highlighting how our health, safety, and understanding of our own bodies are constantly subjected to our culture and the people around us. Deconstructing and re-combining these images of my body has helped me recognize the ways in which all bodies are defined as much by our culture and society as by our own individual anatomy.
Madeline Hernandez
@sadistsloth
Over Grown - pencil and watercolor on paper, 6.5” x 10”, 2021
Circulating - soft pastel on paper, 48” x 72”, 2021
Prolapsed - pencil on handmade paper, 8” x 10”, 2020
Bodies are an absurd assemblage of entrance and exit channels. A body is an aggregate of tubular forms. These works explore what constitutes a body through the rendering of tubular forms as limbs, groping fingers, pendulous breasts, bloated toes, bulging abdomens, and weenies. Portals that comprise these bodies – anuses, urethras, mouths, etc. – are constantly being clogged up, filled up, and choked up. My approach to representing these invented figures exists somewhere between tenderness and mockery. My work is an amalgamation of potty humor, corporeality, and weenies as I continue to explore the representation of bodies.
Rachelle Beaudoin
@rachellebeaudoin
Thighbrows - video, 0:18, $500, 2016
In performances, videos, I confront stereotypes and tropes of gender representation to create a space of uncertainty. Thighbrows, thigh gaps, and facial masks become fodder for my work. I use humor and sarcasm as an entry point into issues of gender, power and class in order to call out the invisible structures and sexism that pervades both the physical world and the online world.
Thighbrows, a short video experiment, is a literal manifestation of the term, coined around 2015 to represent the folded area of skin that creases where the hip and torso meet, especially when bending.
Often employing physical comedy, my videos document performances in which I explore the pressures and contradictions I face on a daily basis. I push concepts from web videos and advertising to the absurd so that the content becomes humorous and sometimes alarming.
Jessica Swank
@jessicawswank
Self Mended No. 1 - Archival Inkjet Print, 30" x 24.5", 2021, $550
Intersections of the organic and synthetic function as a metaphor for the blurring of boundaries between organism, machine, and nature. By utilizing various methods of self-extension, fragmentation, and recontextualization, I give physicality to the merging of these entities. I consider this work a personal reconciliation with the ever-changing relationship between humans and technology. For this reason, I use many elements that are remains of myself or those close to me, creating sculptural forms and assemblages of natural materials, flesh-like membranes, and manufactured objects. I see my skin as a corporeal embodiment of a boundary. Once given a synthetic physical form, it is possible to puncture, blur or remove the margins completely. This meditative process of composing these forms becomes a method of self-reflection and an act of reclamation over the body and self as a human. In documenting the interplay between material, gesture, landscape, and my own fragmented body, these images form a narrative of interdependence, reliance, tension, and inseparability.
Isla Gordon & Ashley Kaye
@islapgordon
Eat Your Heart Out Kim K - Archival Inkjet Print, 18x24”, 2021, $350
Untitled - Archival Inkjet Print, 24x18”, 2021, $350
Our series, Starter Home, is a visual record of our new life home-owners as Isla transitions to life as a woman. Through documenting and sharing the social performance of homemaking, we are creating a sense of belonging in a traditionally heteronormative space. Creating this space together, we are finding the freedom to explore new understandings of womanhood away from our upbringing in conservative environments or our assigned genders. Within the work, we engage with feminine beauty rituals and mundane housework. These tasks present challenges, whether in Ashley's rejection of feminine norms, Isla's romanticization of a cliched femininity, or grappling with yard work traditionally assigned to men or modeled to them by men.
As we unpack and decorate our home, our improvised still lives and portraits document spaces and people in transition. The intimacy of the portraits and attention to the small details of the home expose the images' importance in our construction of self. The work provides visibility to both the transgender and queer domestic experience and visualizes our ongoing process of learning and unlearning as we redefine our ideas of domesticity and marriage.
Gizem Konyar
@gizem_konyar
Münevver - 2021 Free hand machine sewing on paper and women's socks, 25x35 cm
Saime - 2021 Free hand machine sewing on paper and women's socks, 25x35 cm
Hasibe - 2021 Free hand machine sewing on paper and women's socks, 25x35 cm
Deformed; focuses on the burdens women carry throughout their lives. From childbearing to their deforming bodies and obsessions with body image as they age.
As she confronts the changes in her life during her inner journey, she discovers that she is also provided with the opportunity to reinvent herself. The entire series is free hand machine on paper.
Junli Song
@artsofsong
La Danse - lithograph, 15’’x21’’, 2021, $600
My current work is inspired by the ancient Chinese cosmography, the Shanhaijing, which I reinterpret through a feminist, diasporic lens. Centring around a female re-imagining of a mythological headless deity, who I have named Nu Xingtian, the world created within my printmaking exists as an imaginary realm where the liminal becomes a space of alternative existence. As a Chinese-American woman, I created Nu Xingtian as a symbol of feminist resistance. I have undertaken the immersive project of world-building to create a space where I belong, and to make sense of the complex, often contradictory, realities of existing between cultures and within the intersectionality of gender and race. In the same way that this ancient cosmography tried to map out the world order of the time, I am trying to re-invent and understand my own world through my work. I am especially interested in exploring questions of authenticity and the ‘real’, of past and tradition, and the corporality of the female body and its associations with vulnerability and softness.
A.M. Disher
@amdisher
Gender Hang-up - Digital Collage, various sizes (up to 32" x 40"), 2021, NFS
The wood becomes viscera and flesh, a self-portrait.
Wood has no gender and is a material metaphor for queer identity. Much of the wood A.M. uses are sections that have been damaged when the tree was alive and then began to heal. Others are the roots of the tree- the base support, and the main mode of sustenance. A.M. paints the wood to reference flesh and viscera. The work exists in a liminal space between healing and freshly wounded.
Neurodivergent, mentally ill, and gender non-conforming people are pressed to function in a system that causes them harm by pressuring them to conform to 'normalcy'. They are in a perpetual state of tending to psychic wounds that remain in flux and are never allowed to heal or exist as they are.
A.M. uses domestic objects in addition to wood to create a narrative that responds to various facets of these oppressed identities. Color acts as the initial draw and separates it from gore. A.M.'s color palette is bubblegum grotesque, they are looking for a place between cartoonish, exaggerated color, and realism. The objects paired with the wood must have elements of complementary or vibrant color, aesthetic beauty, or absurdity in addition to concept, this is vital in order to break down the weight of the concept at hand and allow for approach. There are elements of absurdity, beauty, and color to the experience of queerness, mental Illness, and neurodivergence.
The vulnerability of the subject matter, paired with the bold color and playfulness of the work, exudes power and defiance over the oppressive social environment and mental illness as the objects are formed. A.M. is exploring places where beauty and the grotesque intersect, this exploration becomes the documentation of their illness; it is the anatomy of their melancholy.
Sarah Meyers Brent
@sarah_meyers_brent
All Dressed Up with No Place to Go - Upcycled Objects and Mixed Media, 16.5”x11”x5.5", 2021, $795
A Portrait of a Woman and a Mother During a Pandemic - Upcycled Objects and Mixed Media, 18”x13”x12”, 2021, $795
My mixed media works take discarded items from my house, community and town transfer station to create sculptures and alternative landscapes that embody the craziness of motherhood and environmental chaos. The mix of old kids’ clothes, paint globs, toys and rags, incorporated with dirt and other natural elements, look as if they are simultaneously growing and decaying. They express the weight of raising children in environmental disorder while juggling our lives and trying to maintain a sense of self and balance. Referencing the overuse of stuff in our lives and the mental load that women carry around, piles of trash take on a second, organic life. I work through the mess of life to try to find order in chaos and beauty in the reality of imperfection.
Contact us at stayhomegallery@gmail.com for purchasing information.