New York, NY: Porter Contemporary is pleased to announce participation in artxwomen at the Affordable Art Fair in Los Angeles from January 18 - January 22, 2012. Artxwomen is a special section of eight galleries presenting only female artists as well as dedicated programming and special installations.
In the curation of this exhibit, Jessica L. Porter, Owner and Director of Porter Contemporary, explores whether being a feminist in the artworld is in fashion and what it means when we identify artwork as Feminist? The feminist art movement starting in the 1960s refers to the efforts of feminists such as the Guerrilla Girls that have helped change the foundation for the reception of contemporary art created by women.
Porter Contemporary is highlighting in artxwomen the works of female artists: Jennie Barrese, Jessica Charlotte, Jee Hwang, Sarah Kaufman, Lori Larusso, Katarzyna Majak, Jennifer Murray, Carolina Rodriguez Baptista, and Catherine Tafur. Katarzyna Majak explores the power of women as she searched for female wisdom and plurality of spiritual paths hidden within the monoreligious Polish society. The witches, healers, enchanters, visionaries and spiritual leaders she discovered are discriminated against in the Catholic society and this series of work was the first time many of them owned their power publicly. Exploring themes of gender, sexuality, and sociopolitical power struggles, Jennifer Murray uses totemic animal characters to express her impressions of human life within the decaying and carnal confines of New York City. Carolina Rodriguez Baptista draws inspiration from the complex world of women: makers of life, owners of the secret keys of wisdom and intuition, and driving forces that shape the game of life. Catherine Tafur explores ideas of gender deconstruction, confrontational sexuality, and the disillusionment and loss of innocence through imagery of disfigurements, idealized androgyny and mutilation.
Listing Information:
What: Affordable Art Fair Los Angeles, special section Art x Women
When: January 18 - 22, 2012
Benefit Reception: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 from 5:00PM - 7:30 PM
Private Preview: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 from 7:30PM - 10:00 PM
Where: Event Deck at L.A. LIVE
Visitor Entrance: Georgia St. between Chick Hearn Ct. and W. Olympic Blvd.
Parking Entrance: 1005 Chick Hearn Ct.
Fair Hours: Thursday, January 19th from 12PM - 9PM, Friday and Saturday January 20th and 21st from 11AM - 8PM, Sunday, January 22nd 11AM-6PM
General inquiries: info@portercontemporary.com
Press Inquires: media@portercontemporary.com
Related events:
Is Feminist Art in Disguise? Talk & Tour with Jessica Porter of Porter Contemporary
Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 12pm
Is being a feminist out of fashion? Does it hurt or help when we identify an artwork as "feminist"? Jessica L. Porter, Owner, and Director of Porter Contemporary, will explore potentially feminist works in the artxwomen section and throughout the Fair, discussing the pros and cons of identifying works as such.
About the Artists:
Jennie Barrese explores change and how in order to grow, we must first let go and leave behind certain things in order to survive.
Jessica Charlotte is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work explores the hidden regions of the mind where apparitions of strange creatures form and dissolve in dreams and leave only their haunting footprints on the waking mind. Working in acrylics, Jessica manages to bring to life these exotic, wistful and beautiful images that somehow resonate in the empty spaces in all of us where the child once resided but now, only absence and longing.
Jee Hwang, born and raised in Seoul, South Korea graduated from Pratt Institute with a MFA degree in 2009 and received the A.I.R. Fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year. Hwang's work eloquently eludes to a paradox that embraces the human condition while expressing the potency of the simple gestures we use to speak our ineffable thoughts.
Sarah Kaufman, an Assistant Professor of Art in Photography at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, finds her subjects on Craigslist and visits them in their homes. She asks them to try to show her the world that they inhabit when they are alone and the resulting photographs explore the relationships among the subjects, their bodies, and their spaces.
Lori Larusso explores the unavoidable contradictions which exist in our personal and collective systems of belief by pointing to the complexity of individual situations. Very often, our ideals are a reflection of the way we wish things were, rather than a product of the way we actually experience them and she finds this conflict to be in direct connection to the representational image. Larusso graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning with a Bachelors Degree in the Fine Arts, and a minor in Women’s Studies. She continued to earn a Master’s Degree in the Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s graduate interdisciplinary program, the Mount Royal School of Art. Lori has worked in the community as an advocate for reproductive rights, and an adjunct professor of drawing, as well as maintaining a solid studio practice.
Born and raised in Warsaw, Poland Katarzyna Majak received her B.F.A. in Photography at Poznan Academy of Fine Arts and is now working towards a PhD. Majak explores the power of women as she searched for female wisdom and plurality of spiritual paths hidden within the monoreligious Polish society. The witches, healers, enchanters, visionaries and spiritual leaders she discovered are discriminated against in the Catholic society and this series of work was the first time many of them owned their power publicly.
Exploring themes of gender, sexuality, and sociopolitical power struggles, Jennifer Murray uses totemic animal characters to express her impressions of human life within the decaying and carnal confines of New York City. Murray recently completed a Masters in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, where her concentration was post-colonial studies, gender politics, and metaphorical framing in sociopolitical discourse.
Carolina Rodriguez Baptista draws inspiration from the complex world of women: makers of life, owners of the secret keys of wisdom and intuition, and driving forces that shape the game of life. Rodriguez Baptista was born in Venezuela, moved to New York City to attend The Parsons School of Design and currently lives in Barcelona, Spain.
Born in Peru, Catherine Tafur moved to New York City to attend the Cooper Union School of Art and now resides in New York. Using images of the body, Tafur explores ideas of gender deconstruction, confrontational sexuality, and the disillusionment and loss of innocence through imagery of disfigurements, idealized androgyny and mutilation.
Affordable Art Fair Past and Present
Twelve years ago, Will Ramsay changed the model of the traditional art fair by creating the Affordable Art Fair, where contemporary art is accessible to all. Now in 10 locations around the world, with the upcoming L.A. fair being the 11th, Affordable Art Fair proves that you don’t need to be an art expert or a billionaire to have original works of art by living artists in your home or office. With the fair taking place in Amsterdam (spring and fall), Bristol, Brussels, London (spring and fall), Los Angeles, Melbourne, Milan, New York (spring and fall), North London, Singapore, and Sydney, over $270 million worth of art has been sold at the fairs. The success of the brand continues with the estimated millionth visitor to the Affordable Art Fair expected in 2011.