SUFFER BETTER curated by Alexandra Hammond
November 2 - December 2, 2019
opening reception Saturday Nov 2 from 5-8pm
184 Project Space
artists include: Natalie Baxter, Sarah Grass, Joanne Leah, Regina Parra, and Pippi Zornoza
Pocket Object invites artists across multiple disciplines, mediums, and the internet to produce a small edition of keychain-sized objects available for cheap purchase. These tiny totems are meant to jangle on your hip, tumble in a tote, or simply serve as a small-scale reminder of the practice of a favorite artist or friend. The small, dangling works are each priced at under $100 and explore the endless variability of small-scale sculpture.
The traveling exhibition is organized by Chicago-based artist Noël Morical, who began macraméing small keychains five years ago as a way to scale down her practice for work trades and friend gifts. Pocket Object is an expansion of this expression, an affordable way to purchase work while supporting your favorite artist's practice.
December 13 - 15, 2019 at GLORIA’S PROJECT SPACE
Dec 8 - 15, 2019 at deBalie in Amsterdam
Barbie: Dreaming of a Female Future
August 10, 2019 - January 26, 2020 - Arrington Gallery
Barbie: Dreaming of a Female Future takes a critical look at Barbie on the occasion of her 60th anniversary. In the past six decades, Barbie’s many careers and enduring independence have influenced the dreams and imaginations of young people around the world. At the same time, her impossible appearance and physique promoted narrow and unattainable body ideals. This exhibition offers an immersive experience where visitors can explore their relationship with Barbie through a reimagined, modern dream house.
The works in the exhibition represent artists’ interpretations of Barbie and are presented as part of this life-size dream house. Sheila Pree Bright’s photography examines the limited standards of beauty that Barbie represents. Lauren Kelley’s video creates narratives for Barbie as she explores racial identity through a series of vignettes that are at once humorous, absurd, and mundane. The dream house itself, titled Barbie: Dreaming of a Female Future, is created by artists and interior designers, Studio BOCA, and is furnished with objects created by women artists and makers that bring the space to life.
In taking the place of Barbie in her home, visitors can consider their own relationship with the doll and the ways in which she may have impacted their perceptions of self. The dream house highlights the importance of imagination and functions as a welcoming space, one where everyone– people of all genders, sexualities, and identities– can come to dream of a female future.
Participating artists, designers, and women-owned businesses include: Aelfie, Addie Chapin, Calico Wallpaper, David Levinthal, Eskayel, Estudio Persona, Flat Vernacular, Greta de Parry, Grace Hartigan, Lauren Kelley, Kim Markel, Natalie Baxter, Quiet Town, Range Projects, Ruby Star Society, Sazerac Stitches, Sheila Pree Bright, Stray Dog Designs, Studio BOCA, and Tamar Mogendorff.
Dangerously Close to Weaving is a Proud Celebration of Textile Art by Erica Ciccarone // June 20, 2019
SHE SHED
1623 Hancock Street, Ridgewood Queens, NY
Nov 17 - Dec 16 // opening reception Nov 17 from 6-10pm
WARM GUN
181 Orchard Street, New York, NY
November 9 - December 8 // opening reception Friday November 9 from 7-9pm
Stuff(ed) features a selection of contemporary artists – Jessica Dance, David Gabbard, and Natalie Baxter – using soft sculpture to explore issues around consumer culture, social conventions, and artistic tradition. This exhibition will examine the playful, subversive power of sculpted fabric to transform and reimagine mass-market commodities and bric-a-brac from everyday life.
Participating Artists:
Farah Al Qasimi, Natalie Baxter, Deborah Castillo, Kristina Davis, Dynasty Handbag,
Jesse Harrod, INNER COURSE (Rya Kleinpeter and Tora López),
Lady Parts Justice League’s Vagical Mystery Tour, Jen Liu, Rachel Mason, Jan Mun,
Luis Mejico, Madhini Nirmal, Kameelah Janan Rasheed,
Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Andréa Stanislav
On January 10, 2017, CODEPINK activist Desiree Fairooz was arrested and later convicted for laughing during Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Senate confirmation hearing. As Senator Richard Shelby commended Sessions for his record of “treating all Americans equally under the law,” Fairooz let out a quick, sharp cackle before being escorted from the courtroom and arrested for “disorderly and disruptive” behavior.
Fairooz’s reflexive outburst is just one scenario conveying the transgressive potential of laughter to threaten authority, as power and control are briefly shifted and destabilized. In an increasingly tense political landscape, laughing is an everyday gesture capable of unsettling norms, subverting power, and challenging dominant systems. Laugh Backexamines the diverse cultural production of self-identifying women who engage the defiant possibilities of humor, satire, and the absurd as subversive tools for cultural change.
The artists in Laugh Back use humor to create a symbolic space for transformation in which structures of power and repression are recognized and confronted. Focusing specifically on the practices of self-identifying women, the exhibition reframes the trope of humorless feminist resistance by emphasizing deployments of the absurd that disrupt presumed stable discourses. The works in the exhibition speak directly to the contemporary sociopolitical climate, examining race, gender, labor, and politics from multicultural perspectives to uncover a current, uniquely feminist brand of humor that is an increasingly threatened and threatening vehicle to speak truth to power. Employing diverse comedic genres, these artists use humor as a means to upset, if only for a visceral moment, established ways of being.
