CURATORIAL > COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
Collective Conciousness
Curated by Kathryn Myers and Jayanthi Moorthy
About
Cooperative Consciousness introduces the work of sixteen A.I.R. Gallery artists in
New York, the pioneering and longest-running cooperative feminist gallery in the
United States. Launched in 1972 and located in SoHo, A.I.R. (Artists in Residence,
Inc.) is presently located in Dumbo, Brooklyn. For over four decades, A.I.R. has
provided a crucial professional exhibition platform, mentorship, and networking
opportunities for women artists. A.I.R. artists appreciate the value of community
and fellowship in an increasingly market-driven art scene that fosters
competitiveness and isolation.
The multi-generation group of women included in the exhibition Cooperative
Consciousness typifies A.I.R. artists as having exceptionally diverse creative
practices. Their work offers a wealth of inquiry and insights into mutable and
shifting senses of identity that might be defined by gender, race, ethnicity,
generation, or geography. Through diverse experimental approaches and the use of
materials, several themes emerge that create connecting currents among works
of art in this exhibition.
Artists' Work
Louise McCagg, Nancy Morrow, Jayanthi Moorthy, Alisa Henriquez, Shannon Forester, Julia Kim Smith, and Jody Joldersma, evoke unique and universal, unfixed, fluid, and shifting senses of personal, social, or cultural identity. A fragmentation of the internal space and boundaries of their images amplifies the potent and poetic issues and experiences they respond to and address. An uncanny mash-up of materials sourced from the trash through the internet propels new forms and meaning in the works of Daria Dorosh, Yvette Dubinsky, Jane Gilmor, d’Ann de Simone, and Melissa Furness.
Reclaimed, recycled, and recombined materials and images are catalysts for investigations of collective history, travel, and culture as well as feminine and gender identity. Traversing permeable boundaries between abstraction and representation, Jane Swavely, Joan Snitzer, Maxine Henryson, Mimi Oritsky, and Shannon Forester provoke cerebral and formal dialogues with art history, culture, space, and
sensation. Through the interplay of optics and perception, they attempt to visualize imperceptible forms, feelings, and forces through both the tactile presence and the elusive subtlety of material and form.
Meet The Artists
Artworks In The Show
Jane Gilmor
Nearly thirty years ago the serendipitous discovery of a hand-drawn Kama Sutra woodcut series in a Katmandu shop inspired Jane Gilmor’s multi-component installation. The awkward, naïve style of these appropriated erotic images contrasts with the suggested eroticism of the frames’ sensuous surfaces. The cast glass Japanese Mikasa frames, found on eBay, evoke “the kitsch factor in marketing the sublime in American culture.” Beneath the floating images is a small table with embossed aluminum ruffles containing an open Kama Sutra book embedded in a pool of fake water. Kama Kama Corner II brings to mind the home shrines found in India and other locations Gilmor has traveled to, such as Mexico and Greece.
d’Ann de Simone’s
d’Ann de Simone’s dazzlingly dense images are assembled from multiple found and hand-painted sources: consumer trash, digital images, recycled artwork, and the handicrafts of Chinese paper cuts
traditionally practiced by women. Layering linear and patterned shapes over soft-edged monochromatic grounds, she “contrasts
compositional elements that reinforce and symbolize opposing forces.” Her forms and forces suggest quotidian, natural, and wondrous worlds, such as candy wrappers on a sidewalk, remnants of flyers on walls, or the unfolding actions of a mysterious mythological cosmos.
Melissa Furness
Through her translations of historic artifacts, the “ruin” for Melissa Furness, serves as an “attempt to reconnect ourselves with the past that can create space for an alternative present.” In a series of paired oval paintings, Manly Moss, fragments from a series of historic Romantic images can be seen beneath layers of natural dried moss. By recontextualizing these historic works through a comparison of male and female gestures symbolizing “aggressive versus recessive sexual roles,” she observes that despite changes in history and the passage of time, gendered roles and relationships continue to endure.
Jane Swavely
Disorienting and furtive, Jane Swavely’s intimately scaled semi-abstract paintings hover between reality and dream, suggesting landscapes or waterscapes where the viewer might have lost their balance, fallen sideways or upside down. Resembling the peculiar optics of photographs clicked unknowingly, they offer a new way of experiencing the familiar, hovering in a place “between darkness and light, conscious and subconscious, surface and material.”
Joan Snitzer
In a play between hard and soft-edged forms, expanded and confined space, Joan Snitzer explores visual and emotive tensions between
free-flowing warm and cool brushwork, and the organizing structure of the grid. “Paying tribute to the abstract artistic movements of the
20th century,” as the exuberance of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting gave way to spare monochromatic minimalism,
Snitzer’s work enacts a visual dialogue between movement and stasis, form, and structure as well as with art history
Jayanthi Moorthy
Jayanthi Moorthy’s versatile works explore “personal and cultural identity and their contemporary interpretations.” Relocating to New York from India over a decade ago, Moorthy translates cultural and religious references from India into her creative practice. In her drawings she uses quotidian and ephemeral materials such as
rice flour, sand and spices. In her painting In & Out she creates a woven texture on the canvas by layering acrylics that resemble threads. Moorthy’s works can be viewed through the simultaneous
lens of ancient and modern, east and west.
Jody Jolderma
Informed by her youth in Pennsylvania spent “caught between a collapsing conservative steel town and the rural escapism of her grandparent’s farm in the coal mountains,” Jody Joldersma’s haunting paintings and portraits suggest a range of psychic, social, geographic, and class-based indicators of identity. Perhaps experiencing the trauma of isolation and alienation from personal tragedy, misplaced desires, economic downturn, and changing fortunes, her anxious figures appear prematurely aged, too young for the pain they appear to endure.
Alisa Henriquez
The striking totem-like structure of Alisa Henriquez’s Makeover Culture Disfigured #5 remixes and layers appropriated and refashioned images from popular and glamorous culture. “Exploring multiple histories, various beliefs and contradictory notions of self, ”her concepts and imagery are drawn from personal experience as well as historic and mythological representations of women.” Shiny lozenge-like shapes forming the tower’s glitzy surfaces suggest pills or cosmetic containers, attracting through their consumer flash, but warning through wary eyes at various vantage points.
Julia Kim Smith
Julia Kim Smith’s investigations of “racism, sexism, misrepresentation, and underrepresentation” inform her photographic series, With Bansky: Great Artists Steal. In images eliciting both impending threat and dreadful humor, a faceless man in a hoodie inhabits domestic spaces with a woman calmly performing daily chores. Upon finding that the hooded figure is a stand-in for the artist Bansky, the identity of an anonymous celebrity is paired with one of accommodation, as Bansky’s host appropriates his identity at the service of her “new social memes and street art for the internet.”
Maxine Henryson
In photographic diptychs of sacred sites in India, Maxine Henryson pairs literal and imagined realities. Identifiable spaces or scenes paired with blurred details are linked by symbiotic color relationships. Her series Ujjay’s Journey “is a visual poem in which she explores religious coexistence, rituals, the female world, and nature.” Suggesting the moment of Darshan, where a current of connection occurs as the devotee’s eyes behold those of the deity, Henryson’s images perhaps visualize a moment of altered optical, sensory, and psychic states of self.
Nancy Morrow
The layered flickering line and translucent surfaces
of Nancy Morrow’s paintings on paper echo
the “blurred boundaries of personhood” she movingly describes. As an intimate witness to her husband’s late stages of dementia, her empathy with his increasingly fragile grasp on identity extends to imagining and visualizing moments of clarity, and his fragmented, flickering interaction with his “heroic, hidden and devoted” caregivers. The luminosity of Morrow’s work reflects an acceptance of the gradual but total loss of self and the transient but hopeful moments between.
Louise Mc-Cagg
Describing herself as “an artist of a generation that saw feminist art proliferate,” Louise McCagg’s cast paper life masks mirror the growing ecumenical and democratic spirit of religious and cultural inclusion that characterized the decade when A.I.R. Gallery was launched. “Classical in method and contemporary in its political and social inquiry,” her work multiplies, merges and magnifies the individuality of unique portraits with the sense of universality among diverse cultures.
Shannon Forrester
As direct studies of nature along with attempts to find the ethereal, the sublime, and the magical, Shannon Forrester merges vignettes observed in the physical world with translations from a more philosophical space that exists somewhere between “possible and impossible.” Traversing realms of observed landscape and imperceptible metaphysical experience, her paintings “aim to find the essence of magic in the physical while also pursuing avenues to convert the metaphysical and abstract into material representation.”
Mimi Oritsky
Using humble quotidian materials, Mimi Oritsky’s delicate ink tracery on paper napkins attempts to trap the rhythm of air and subtle shifts
of space, light, and time. Based on the speed of movement of her hand on paper, “the elements have a sense of urgency within the vast stillness of airspace.” Evoking currents of the breath of life itself, the dematerialization of her images suggests representations of air and space transmuted by the hand of an attuned consciousness open to
the forces of nature.
Daria Dorosh
As a fashion professional and theorist, Daria Dorosh is adept at translating and reutilizing social, cultural, and political symbols of clothing and materials. In her fabric assemblage, Social Grid, the casual but globally universal T-shirt is elevated into “a powerful social signifier and a key transformational object between analog and digital culture.” Through the embodiment of three key events, an environmental battle, a commemoration of a brilliant scientist, and the groundbreaking election of the first African American president, the varied components and symbols she embeds along the totemlike structure, conflate and contrast complex symbols of popular and political culture.
Yvette Drury Dubinsky
Responsive to “recent and historical dispersions of people around the world,” Yvette Drury Dubinsky’s works on paper project a dense, sensuous and intricate physicality. Through an inventive coupling of form and content, she layers and manipulates Japanese paper, maps and multiple printmaking processes over large circular shapes. As her silhouetted figures of multiple generations and occupations walk alone and together, they seem doomed to wander the globe endlessly, as Dubinsky tracks and traces their journey.
Exhibit Programs
During the course of the exhibit, there were a number of exhibit programs for audiences of different age groups. There were panel discussions, artist talks, and workshops for undergrad students and women.
1
PANEL DISCUSSION:
Essential or Essentialized?
The past, potential and current place of artist-run women artist’s cooperatives
In the 1970’s, energized by a groundswell of feminist activism, and fueled by Linda Nochlin’s fraught questioning of why there were great women artists, pioneering women’s cooperative galleries such as the A.I.R. gallery began to reshape the gallery landscape and culture. The idea that female “essence” could be contained in an exhibition space was paralleled by fears that women artists might be “ghettoized,” and that “cooperative,” as an alternative to “commercial,” meant a compromised standard. This panel will explore the different reasons artists have and still choose to join women’s cooperatives, the challenges involved in setting up and sustaining them, and the changing role they have played in the art world at large and the lives of artists. This panel will also explore the visibility and potentialities of women’s galleries in India.
Speakers: Yvette Drury Dubinsky,
Margaret Lanzetta, Pradosh Mishra,
Jayanthi Moorthy, Nancy Morrow,
Sharmila Sagara
Moderator: Kathryn Myers
2
PANEL DISCUSSION:
Women Run Societies And What Can We Learn From Them
Kerala has a matriarchal society and is one of the five other places in the world that practice this form of society. The term matriarchy can be used to define woman- or mother-centered societies that are based on maternal values and principles, like nurturing and caretaking. Matriarchies can be found at the social, economic, political, spiritual, and cultural levels.
The panel will explore the importance of matriarchies and imagined utopias of women-run societies, as existed at some time in the distant past or could be re-created in a possible future, and how the definitions of gendered power themselves might have shifted in relation to varying social and historical contexts.
Speakers: Shailaja Menon, Dr. Mridul Eapen
Moderator: Radhika Rajashekaran
3
ARTIST TALKS:
In-person and Online
Every week participating A.I.R. artists will talk about their art practice and open dialogues with the audience on aspects of feminism related to gender, race, identity, environment, etc. The goal is to have a cross-cultural exchange of ideas and for everyone to learn together or simply share experiences.
