COME ON: Desire Under The Female Gaze
until 27 October 2007
Artists:
Jo-Anne Balcaen
Juliet Jacobson
Rachel Rampleman
Curator: Astria Suparak
Artist Talks: 20 Sept. 2pm
Reception: 20 Sept. 5-8pm
The Warehouse Gallery
at Syracuse University
350 W. Fayette St.
Syracuse, NY 13202
T: 315.443.6450
Three artists in Montreal and Brooklyn explicitly express desire, fantasy, disappointment and pleasure in The Warehouse Gallery’s new exhibition, COME ON: Desire Under The Female Gaze.
A rock star’s virility is deflated through real-life testimonial in a video by Rachel Rampleman, male lovers are displayed in exquisite drawings evoking classical painting conventions by Juliet Jacobson, and Jo-Anne Balcaen employs the trappings of romance in humorous text works and suggestive, ephemeral sculpture.
Join the artists, Director Astria Suparak, and Assistant Director Frank Olive on Thursday, September 20th for a reception celebrating The Warehouse Gallery’s one-year anniversary. For details, images and preview clips, visit www.thewarehousegallery.org
COME ON: Desire Under The Female Gaze
We may be the inheritors of 20th-century feminisms, yet the continued objectification of young girls and women remains devastating and oppressive. Despite the protests and critiques shaped by two generations of thinkers, activists and image-makers, mainstream media continues to enforce the notion of dichotomous gender. Double standards, as well as double entendres, are the stock-in-trade of television programming, prevalent humor, dominant cinema and insidious advertising.
The young artists whose work comprises COME ON: Desire Under the Female Gaze seek to present desire as a polymorphous experience. They reject the use of their nude bodies, a foundational strategy frequently employed in feminist art since the 1960s. Instead, they direct our focus to the performance of looking and at the objects of their gaze. Rampleman’s video calls attention to the gross imbalance between the cultural championing of male debauchery and the repudiation of female promiscuity. Jacobson’s drawings depict the mythic blurring of physical, emotional and spiritual thresholds transgressed by subjects in love. Balcaen’s sculpture and language-based work unveil the commodification of desire as simply cheap, seductive materials and socially scripted feelings.
COME ON presents unabashed explorations and unapologetic articulations of female libido. It encourages us to widen our notions of acceptable behavior for women and girls, and to expand our tolerance for images of sexualized, passive males. This exhibition is a response to both the barrage of sexually “available” female figures and to the rejection of queer and eroticized male imagery in mass media.
The title of the exhibition, COME ON, works in a number of ways: it can be read as a dismissive phrase, referring to the way the female gaze and empowered female sexuality are often discounted; and, simultaneously, as encouragement, invitation, goad, proposition, incitement. Ultimately, COME ON aspires to open up radical possibilities of pleasure.
COME ON RELATED VIEWING
Concert : Fri. 24 Aug. 8pm @ New York State Fair
Poison + other metal bands
Screening : Sun. 26 Aug. 8pm @ Spark Art Space Daughters of Joy! Experimental video and audio about sex + Lickety Split smut zine
Screening : Thu. 18 Oct. 8pm @ Watson Theater, Syracuse University Emotional Realism: Videos that pose questions about the rhetoric of honesty and the production of empathy in the viewer
Store : Tue.- Sat. during exhibition @ The Warehouse Gallery
Videos, art journals, artist posters, zines available
Television : Sundays 9pm @ VH1 Rock of Love
THE WAREHOUSE GALLERY at Syracuse University exhibits and commissions work by emerging and accomplished artists whose work engages the community in a dialogue regarding the role the arts can play in illuminating critical issues.
For more information contact:
info@thewarehousegallery.org
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse, N.Y. 13202
T: 315.443.6450
