I have an installation showing at 21c Museum Hotel Chicago. Details here:
Rituals—religious and cultural, institutional and domestic—provide the thematic infrastructure for OFF-SPRING: New Generations. These sculptures, paintings, photographs, and videos employ iconographic imagery to explore the development of both personal and group identity, childhood, family, history, and gender politics. At the wedding altar, in the family home, or in the classroom, within the fantasy of childhood play or the familiarity of grown-up habit, these new, old narratives generate a spectrum of meditations on the contemporary construction of self and society.
The history and symbolism of marital rituals are both exposed and transformed in works by Asya Reznikov, Beth Moysés, and Rachel Lee Hovnanian, addressing a broad range of issues within the metaphoric constraints of tradition. These works reference what brides have worn and carried to and from the altar, in search of a blessing, a partner, a new self or different life. Reznikov’s Packing: Bride enacts the nostalgia and anticipation of displacement. Illuminating the mental and emotional state of transition experienced by immigrants and travelers, Reznikov fills a suitcase with objects and images that constitute bridal “necessities”—items that may fulfill the bride’s desire for material and psychological preparedness as she embarks on a new life in an unfamiliar world. The brides featured in Beth Moysés’s still and moving images are embarking on a transformative journey both physical and emotional. Reconstructing Dreams creates a new ritual: female survivors of domestic abuse walk together through the streets of Montevideo, Uruguay, to the central public square, where they sit and embroider the patterns of the lines in their hands on their gloves, discarding their past and wedding themselves to new lives. Rachel Lee Hovnanian’s Dinner for Two presents another menace to intimate relationships: technology. Represented as screens, a bride and groom celebrate their union, sharing a network connection but not conversation; they gaze outward to their electronic devices and not toward each other, failing to notice a mouse slowing consuming their wedding cake, and potentially, their love.
Both Lalla Essaydi and Angela Ellsworth explore the conventions and aesthetics of the faith-based traditions in which they were raised—Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known as Mormonism. The women invoked in Angela Ellsworth’s sculpture, Eliza and Emily, are bound to each other: the pin-sharp straps of these 19th-century-style bonnets, fashioned from thousands of pearl corsage pins, are continuous, holding them forever in place, opposing and supporting one another. A descendant of Mormon prophet Lorenzo Snow, Ellsworth examines women in the context of fundamentalist Mormonism, and the ritual, symbolism, and constraint inherent in trappings such as Seer Bonnets. Cloistered and covered head to toe with lines of henna script, the women featured in Lalla Essaydi’s Les Femmes du Maroc: Harem Women Writing emerge from the artist’s Moroccan girlhood. “I needed to return to the culture of my childhood if I wanted to understand my unfolding relation to the ‘converging territories’ of my present life,” says the artist, who now lives in the U.S. The texts, which are primarily autobiographical and written in the Islamic script that was forbidden for her female relatives to use, “is the story of my quest to find my own voice,” while revealing and affirming other lives and stories unheard.
