Review of Liberties at Collyer Bristow Gallery

16/09/15

Liberties

Collyer Bristow Gallery
2 July – 21 October 2015

The year 1975 was a landmark one for women around the world. It was declared by the United Nations to be International Women’s Year, and, in the UK, it saw the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act and the Employment Protection Act (making statutory maternity pay a requirement for employers and legislating against dismissal on the grounds of pregnancy). Since then, things have continued to improve in the UK: in 1976, the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act was introduced; in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected as Britain’s first female prime minister; in 1987, Julie Hayward, a canteen cook at a Liverpool shipyard, became the first woman to win a case under the amended Equal Pay Act; and in 1992 Betty Boothroyd MP became the first female Speaker in the House of Commons. There is still much to be fought for to achieve full equality, however, and the creation of such projects as Million Women Rise (2007) and the Everyday Sexism Project (2012) is testament to this. This year has seen the founding of the UK Women’s Equality Party by broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and author and journalist Catherine Mayer. 

Given this unsatisfactory status quo, the curatorial duo Day+Gluckman (Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman) wanted to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a pivotal year, but also to provoke and encourage continued attempts at revolution and radical transformation. As Alexandra M Kokoli notes in an essay to accompany the exhibition,1 “feminist accounts of the past first emerged as feminist responses to gaps in historical narratives”. The curation of this show follows what the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal has called a “preposterous history”, whereby contemporary artworks quote or allude to past artworks, “put[ting] what came chronologically first (‘pre’) as an aftereffect behind (‘post’) its later recycling”.2 This is exemplified in Jessica Voorsanger’s Claude Monet (Bald Series) (2013), where a woman is seen adorned with the artist’s iconic beard; Rose English’s Baroque Harriet 2 and 3 (1973) where women are seen reclining on a chaise longue and posed in a frame, but wrapped up respectively in a duvet and a large bow, destroying the traditional gaze, by offering them some modesty; and EJ Major’s series investigating the axe attack on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus by suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914.

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Review of Jackson Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

14/09/15

Jackson Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
23 April  – 16 November 2015

In 1948, Clement Greenberg wrote his essay The Crisis of the Easel Picture. The previous year, Jackson Pollock (1912-56), applying for a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, wrote (highly likely with the aid of Greenberg): “I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and mural. I have set a precedent in this genre in a large painting for Miss Peggy Guggenheim. […] I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural.”1 The mural he mentions is a vast panorama spanning a canvas six metres long, the largest painting he ever made, and credited by Willem de Kooning as “[breaking] the ice” for abstract expressionism. Now on display at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the work forms the basis for a small but enlightening exhibition, exploring the context in which it was produced and showing something of the effect it had on the contemporary art world.

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Portfolio: Shalini Seereeram

13/09/15
Portfolio: Shalini Seereeram

“I am putting myself out there and challenging silences. I know I am not the same but why must I be quiet?”

Indo-Trinidadian artist Shalini Seereeram (born 1972) has been representing the growing LGBT art and culture community in the Caribbean for the past 15 years and is the first female artist to publicly portray intimacy between women in her country. Her latest series of works, Intimate Moments, focuses entirely on the interplay between women and comprises vibrantly colourful, fluidly sensual paintings, in acrylics, oils and nail varnish, showing women embracing – entangled and entwined – sharing a closeness that requires no words.

“Intimacy to me is not purely physical,” says Seereeram. “It is an emotional dance within ourselves. If I cannot entirely connect with someone on a level of compassion and understanding, it becomes shallow and superficial.”

Seereeram strives to represent that subtle intimacy that only women can truly share. Hailing from a remote part of Trinidad, living amid sugar cane fields, her work has caused something of a stir in her native community. “There can be a certain underlying hesitation and mixed reviews because of innate prejudices in society,” she admits. But Seereeram is not ashamed to bare her intimate moments and hopes that her work will encourage others to accept themselves for who they are. “There is someone out there who is saying they are not seeing images of themselves,” she says. And that is something she is working to change.

Shalini Seereeram’s exhibition, Intimate Moments, was held at Campbells Framing and Art Gallery, South Kensington, this August. Her works are still available for viewing and purchasing at the gallery.

campbellsoflondon.co.uk

shaliniseereeram.com

See the full spread in the October 2015 print issue of DIVA magazine

Image:
Passion's Shelter
2015
acrylic

Interview with Judy Chicago

12/09/15
Interview: Judy Chicago

Star Cunts & Other Attractions
Riflemaker
14 September - 31 December 2015

The World Goes Pop
Tate Modern
17 September 2015 - 24 January 2016

In 1968, Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen, 1939) chose not to participate in the California Women in the Arts exhibition at the Lytton Center because she didn’t want to show in any group defined as “women”, “Jewish” or “California”. A couple of years later, however, she coined the term “feminist art” and she then went on to become known worldwide for her epic $250,000 installation, The Dinner Party (1979) – a large triangular table, measuring 48ft by 43ft by 36ft (14.6 metres by 13 metres by 11 metres), with 39 place settings, each commemorating a historical or mythical female figure. Throughout her career, Chicago has been an outspoken advocate for female artists and has written, taught and co-founded educational establishments in a bid to put an end to what she terms the “institutional failure in our universities and museums to teach the history of feminist art”.

In 2011, the Pacific Standard Time project at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, brought attention to a lot of Chicago’s early work and reminded people that there is more to her than her iconic place settings. The following year, she had a show at Riflemaker in London, and the year after that, she was included in the Spotlight section – a section for artists whom the curator deems to have been overlooked and deserving of re-evaluation – of Frieze Masters, also in London.

Read the rest of this interview here

Interview with Jesc Bunyard

07/09/15

Interview: Jesc Bunyard

Performance, disruption and the photographic

Jesc Bunyard (born 1991) has been having a busy year. Following her success in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2014, with which her work toured from Liverpool to Newlyn, via the ICA, she had a residency at the Collusion Real Time Lab in Cambridge in January 2015, and went on to show her film work at the Whitechapel, before being shortlisted as a finalist in the Digital Graffiti juried art competition at Alys Beach, Florida. She is about to have some of her film works shown at the Wysing Arts Centre annual art and music festival, Space-Time: The Multiverse, on 5 September 2015. Only graduating from Goldsmiths with a BA in Fine Art and Art History two years ago, Bunyard has achieved a lot, fast, but she still only sees herself as an emerging artist. She is about to go back to Goldsmiths and embark upon an MA in Contemporary Art Theory.

Anna McNay had an email conversation with Bunyard about her multidisciplinary approach to combining photography, film, performance and installation, placing her viewer in an immersive and perceptually challenging environment.

Read this interview here.