Summary
A visual illustration of the duality and consequence between a woman’s life and the Big Top
Characters:
The Ring-Mistress
The Audience
The Sideshow Performers
The Beauty Contestants
The Clowns
The Fire Breathers
The Tightrope Walker
The Game Players

Setting —
Eyes closed [a humongous tent with three rings, smelling of sugar and animals]
Eyes open [a lovely white gallery space in Haverhill, Massachusetts]
Sound —
circus noises — until the tent goes dark and the sound becomes that of lots of people sitting in hushed anticipation

[a bright, almost blinding spotlight appears and illuminates the Ring-Mistress in the center of the middle ring–a daunting, large middle-aged woman of occasional commanding stature]

Ring-Mistress: Ladeeeez and G-E-N-T-L-E-M-E-N, Boys and Girls. Welcome to the Circus Life and Other Stories. This month, here in our own Big Top [the lovely white gallery space in Haverhill, Massachusetts], right before your very eyes, a fabulous array of ideas has been assembled for your delight and consideration. Join our multi-faceted audience in admiring the courage of our amazing array of side show ladies whose nobility and virtue describes the diverse nature of the female kind…cry and “laugh” with our cavorting clowns–sinister or hilarious–depending on your mood…revel in the glamour of the beauty contestants with the strength and power of the invisible…marvel at the fire breathers singing loudly for the autonomous rights of over half the population of this country…hold your breath at our glorious tightrope walker as she balances life and work under the watchful eyes of those who would keep her on the ground…and lastly…enjoy the participation of interactive word play (my favorite being Incandescent Rage)

But to start, let us give a big round of applause to our inimitable, generous, selfless hostess who has made all of this possible —
Sarah LoVasco and her crew at SJ Art Consulting
Bring your friends…spread the word…The Circus Life and Other Stories is in town until October 20th!!!!

SJ Art Consulting
43 Washington Street, Haverhill MA 01832
Sarah LoVasco (802)999-5506
sarah@sjartconsulting.com

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Deb is an older woman,
and as such invisible. I don’t subscribe to that idea, but I don’t have her experience of erasure both in the workplace and within wider social contexts. Since I’ve known her, Deb’s work has focused on historical representations of women, using references that focus superficially on their femininity but take no interest in their substance. She re-appropriates images of women from golden-age film promo and stock images that skirt around obscenity laws at the time by being on the right side of ‘glamour’. She subverts and empowers them, expresses unrepresented emotions – uncomfortable emotions – and uses materials, commonly associated through sexist stereotypes, to imbue them with political meaning.

Her series of Bag Lady works take reference from photographs of swimsuit models in the ‘50s, of beauty queen contests, and re-presents them with their heads covered by cheap paper bags, for me a concise criticism of the grotesque hunger of the male gaze on the one hand yet slightly mournful of the limitations of feminist emancipation under capitalism on the other. This is why we can’t have nice things. I find there is an uncomfortable contradiction in her fascination with perceptions of feminine beauty – a contradiction in me perhaps – in that on the one hand it makes comment on the commodification of a feminine ideal, the notions of sell-by-dates and the fetishisation of youthful vitality and value, but it also celebrates it. There is no contradiction there at all, it suggests. Why would there be? And then you realise that your own internal programming of how to look at and define these ideas comes from a position of some institutional imposition. There is a scrutiny of the tenuous notions of freedom in a lot of the work, of the true cost of ‘gifted’ rights, and the illusion that this constitutes some kind of freedom. There is an awareness of the duality of intent that is sold to us through encouragement of self-expression. Her work is saturated by loss, the kind that comes from the slow dissolution of comforting illusions, yet it is often executed with a breaking-point manner, like Miss Havisham ripping away her own curtains. The execution of her work is enviable; she is spare with her lines. There is an economy of expression within her work which lacks neurosis, something of which I am frankly jealous because of my own uptight applications of ink to paper. The way she can describe material with such minimalism makes me blush. It feels like there is a real comfort in her use of tools – they are something of an extension of her, which makes the description of discomfort expressed within them even more interesting to me. I don’t feel comfortable talking about Deb’s work, not because I don’t love it, I do, it’s why I’m so pleased she agreed to show it here. But because essentially my opinion of it is counter to its purpose. It doesn’t require me to talk over it, doesn’t need my opinion and my voicing of it almost feels like an affront to its autonomy.
But talk of it I have to, and my discomfort in doing so is part of its allure and potency.

The three works here are exceptional expressions of portraiture;
they seemingly embrace notions of traditional portraiture while completely vandalising the process. They take one of the most normalised and conditioning expressions of early representation – photographs from school yearbooks – and redefine them with a brutal exorcism and rejection of nostalgia. These works are biographical in more than just source; the young woman represented is Deb herself, her body poised in that familiar way of early school training; on display, presentable and positioned with a shoulder just-so, peering back toward the camera as many young girls are contrived to do. But the most sincere expression is the central most destructive one: the aggressive erasure of the central part of a portrait: the face. The purposeful scratching away with its auto-biographical anger, loathing, and possible sadness says more than a trite rendering of facial expression could ever do. It rejects representation, of presentation, of twee rendering. It demolishes sentimentality, literally, and damages itself in a manner that maybe says more than it wants to. I’m not sure whether the motivation behind the erasure is one of sadness at who one was, an anger over how one was treated, or just an expression of pain from having spent so much time having to contemplate and describe a part of you that is gone forever, but they are works of great political force. They are not-portraits and they speak loudly of a life lived, but from far down the line.

What Never Was
continues through March 30
www.kingsgateworkshops.org.uk

for the full text regarding the exhibit – copy and paste
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GcPiPKklUkhA3fvYhOXcUBbeJzsv4XVW/view?usp=sharing
a very good read…

with many thanks to Mark Spelman and Kingsgate Project Space

The post What Never Was appeared first on Deborah Whitney.

John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand, and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” Laura Mulvey stated in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, “The male gaze is the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure.”

Developing the concept of the male gaze, Berger and Mulvey both provided an idea to describe the alleged power that men have over women. The women of burlesque maintain that the power is theirs, that by choosing the stage they defied social and gender norms to assert themselves and their bodies. Certainly, this sexualized and objectified construct of women in men’s eyes is outside of the home where it would be the “other” women, not the idealized, virtuous, home makers providing comfort in all forms. The Madonna-Whore dichotomy, as Freud defined it, where men perceive women’s nurturance and sexuality as mutually exclusive, today feels like an antiquated notion.

By combining imagery of burlesque and film stills, stitching as drawing on vintage handkerchiefs, I am flipping the notion of female identity – a female gaze. With the act of combining the satire of Victorian burlesque with the bawdiness of American burlesque, the treatment of this imagery on the hankies brings these girlies in to the home where they are the queens of their own realms.

“The social changes set in motion by the Civil War also began to erode the cultural hegemony of the domestic feminine ideal, the so-called angel in the house. Young women began to think of themselves as unique individuals rather than “true women,” initiating the decades-long movement toward the independent “new woman,” who would become a major cultural phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century.”
–“Domestic and Sentimental Fiction .” American History Through Literature 1870-1920.

To borrow from Abraham Lincoln, these are the better angels.

The Better Angels are included in a group show at
The Maine Museum of Photographic Arts

DECODING THE DOMESTIC

Please join us for the opening reception on June 16th from 5-7 PM
the exhibition continues through August 5

Participating artists include:
Andrew O’Brian
Jessica Burko
Paul Rider
Lynn Karlin
Carol Eisenberg
Lauren Semivan
Candace DiCarlo
Sara Stites
Joyce Tenneson
Caroline Savage
Gail Skudera
Deborah Whitney
Claire Seidl

www.mainemuseumofphotographicarts.org/decoding-the-domestic

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My sister-in-law, Elizabeth Whitney, LICSW (a very smart woman), recently wrote me an email. In it she wrote some thoughts on the concept of hope:

I’m interested in the subject of hope – what it really is beneath the surface layer of optimism for the future. In some of the best things I’ve read, I’ve learned how hope comes when we first face what has been lost and grieve it and then move to use what remains to build a new narrative. So, true hope is grounded in the ability to face the past and from that learn about how to imagine a new future.

This message spoke to me as it summed up the complicated notion that inspired me to start drawing with thread – embroidering – on photo transfers of working women. A few months ago, I was talking to my 24-year-old daughter Mahlon, who at a particularly demonstrative moment declared – It’s like wearing rose-colored goggles! At that time, we had been discussing the concept of women who work, multi-task even, while maintaining the burden of care all while putting the best face forward.

So, I stole that line. It made me think about how best to convey the notion that women carry a lot and keep on going. I have been using appropriated photographs for many years. The work has included painting, drawing, printmaking…and now embroidery. The strength of using arbitrary images is that one can curate the mood, literally pick and choose the moment in time from which to work and draw on the period from which the photograph was produced. I often use vintage photographs as they have a universality that the viewer can relate to creating a sense of familiarity.

The combination of a traditional craft, sewn on swaddling cloth, redolent of women’s roles as mothers, has made these embroidered drawings feel connected to the image of the original vintage photographs. Seeing the world through rose-colored goggles is a metaphor for the idea that hope, and the lessons that we learn, may be conveyed through looking, as Elizabeth says, beneath the surface layer of optimism for the future.

Artwork above: Looking at the World Through Rose Colored Goggles #7 and #14, 2022,
thread and photo transfer on swaddling cloth

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In Men Explain Things to Me author Rebecca Solnit describes going to a dinner at which she is lectured by the host, who she had just met, about a book that he had not yet read (although he had read the review for it). Solnit goes on to relate how it took her friend several times to point out to this man as he pontificated that the book that he was exhorting was written by Solnit. It is on this premise that she goes on to write:

“Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”

The concept of erasure, the wiping of a person – non recognition, dismissal, bullying, intimidation, oppression – crosses cultures and timelines. Women through the ages have endured societal norms that would have them invisible, undoubtedly after a certain age when their physical attributes, and uses, may have changed. A level of achievement often matters little, as a woman’s strength may be a matter of negativity as it breaks the code, and therefore necessitates even greater eradication. We are taught not to be the Bitch, not to make trouble, not to think too much. But with time we find our way, we navigate and negotiate, and understand that to be present in ourselves it is not necessary to gauge our reflection in the faces of those who would choose to keep us powerless.

Bearing witness to the invisibility of oneself and others – an evaluation, acknowledgement, and even embrace of that invisibility – is a power.

The current vernacular of words like cancellation and labeling, along with the divisiveness of the other, is simply the miasma surrounding the effort of many of us who strive for the ability to own our own difference. Historical edict is a tool, not a control, and those who would be resistant to change or try to regulate those who move forward are the ones who lag.

Erasure may obliterate, but it may also augment those who understand that to be effaced is an opportunity for evolution. Clarity and resolve will fortify that progress.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Power of Invisibility is currently on view in the exhibition
Art + Gender
curated by Susan Leslie Maasch
at The Harlow Gallery
Hallowell, Maine

exhibition dates: 6 August – 11 September 2021
call gallery for information 207.622.3813

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A year earlier I had quit my job as a museum preparator to become a freelancer. I worked for a UK based art shipping company, doing whatever needed doing for shipments to NY, mostly to the Lexington Avenue Armory for various art fairs. I worked every fair, and there were many as the art fair business was growing at that time. During some of the all-nighters I would stop and think about how I was the only woman in the building at 3:00 AM. I had already been art handling for 15 years, but the evolution of women doing that work still seemed somewhat fledgling. The union crew were a motley bunch of nappers behind walls, managers named Bruno and Steve, many generals of dubious intellect, all herded by a red-faced camel hair coated Irish guy named Doyle. They were a tribe of grunters and lifers. I would be yelled at regularly to be careful around the fork-lift as I unloaded delivered crates from trucks, and if I put my tools down, they would go away in seconds. The heavy lifting was not the crates, it was the navigation through the muddy brown misogynistic swamp, just trying to do my work. I rationalized it by thinking about how these fellows just did not know what to do with me, I was a vastly different species from the wives and daughters in Queens and New Jersey. Somehow this helped me-to think that the dismissive, sometimes abusive, and usually mean behavior had a tinge of fear of the unfamiliar in it. I admit the sabotage was challenging but would have been impossible had I not come from an upbringing of workers of both genders. Indeed, one of the sad days that year was when my father’s hammer disappeared, one that he used in his years in construction.

Back to the dripping face. I was on my way to the Armory that day to meet a truck. I called my husband to come meet me to help get me home, went to a deli for some ice, and headed into the Armory. The usual suspects were there, clumped around the big back door as usual. As I entered, I suddenly found myself surrounded by my nemeses. In a matter of minutes, the color of the world changed in the building. They clucked and prodded, all ready to call an ambulance, fan my brow, and do whatever they could do to help. I did not need a hospital – it was a matter of ice and aspirin as my injuries could not be stitched. But from those five minutes on life became tolerable when I was there. I had passed a test, earned a badge of honor, allowed them to be the white knights of their ancestry. My blood turned me into a damsel. It was not so much a shift in power, more like a new perception where my vulnerability was more understandable for them and they were no longer anxious about my presence in their midst. I freelanced there for another free and easy year until I was 3 months pregnant with our daughter, after which I took a break for a bit.

The work that I make has that day woven through it. The perception of others, the discrimination from which we operate and how we determine to use our strengths and weaknesses. In the post war years when gender norms were tipping back to “normal” beauty pageants were held with the women wearing hoods to cover faces to keep things simple. Upon discovery of these images I was horrified, and then fascinated. These images helped me to consider the generation of power and perception and I have continued to use the girls as a personal symbol. What we show to the world, and what we keep close is an equalizer. The critic Dan Kany once wrote that the works have a sort of unfocused power and violence, not unlike a smoking sawed-off shotgun. I received this comment with utmost pride, the fact that he got it – the power of what we keep and what we show, how we hold on, and when we let go. The subjectivity of beauty, its uses and its uselessness, the presence of our rage and desire, these are the elements of our currency and our history. And how we present these elements to the world is our own choice.

Twenty-five years later, to this day when I visit the Armory, Bruno and Steve and I pull out our wallets to show the updated pictures that we carry of our children who are now grown.

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My Mother died on Feb 24. Although there were five grueling weeks of hospital, it was relatively
sudden and unexpected. I was able to say goodbye. And the world shut down three weeks later.
As we headed into lockdown my grief threaded its way into the fabric of the creative process.
I started snipping paper, laying tissue, mounting, gluing, sanding, gluing, sanding, gluing, sanding and
finally waxing. With a lot of time, anxiety and boredom became a preoccupation with making more and
more panels, reaching toward finishing another row.

As a result, the panels provided me with the loss of consciousness that making can achieve. Coming back to the present and looking at what the hours had produced with no memory of the design. This disassociation is cathartic and mitigates the daily triggers.

This is unlike the work that I usually do. It is not about personal narrative, nor purge, nor observation.
This is boiled down, an array of problem solving and basic craft that allowed me to let go of one panel
and get on to the next one. It is filled with sorrow, rage, fear, powerlessness, uncertainty, repression and
isolation, but in actuality it is simply a beautiful grid. The Victorians would have approved.

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I took up hiking
I washed my windows
I collaged dozens of works with little bits of paper
I yearned for the residency in Finland that I was supposed to be at
I yearned for my studio in Deptford, South London where I am alone by design…and have not stopped that particular yearning…its an ache at this point
I took my temperature, sometimes three times a day, for no real reason
I grieved for my mother who died in February, and to whom I was lucky enough to say goodbye
I spent time with my daughter who I had not lived with for four years

And I had the sublime Julia Douglas design a fabulous new website for me

It has been a long transition from curating, gallery directing, freelancing, art fair crate hauling, along with art making and motherhood. What the current state of affairs has sorted for me is a desire to process what to do now…what meaning and contribution can I choose. The formation of a website is a remarkable opportunity to organize, collate, improve upon, everything that we do…because sending a cohesive point of view into the world is both a challenge and a reward.

Thank you to Julia Douglas for her wisdom, humor and design sense…she also runs an amazing residency program with her partner Colin Usher www.studiofaire.com and makes beautiful work www.juliadouglas.co.uk

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