IN THE PINK
CURATED BY SARVIA JASSO

Ros­alyn Drexler
K. Gar­cia
Cindy Hinant
Dorothy Ian­none
Manon
Car­olee Schnee­mann
Dasha Shishkin
Betty Tomp­kins

In the Pink is a group exhi­bi­tion fea­tur­ing paint­ings, draw­ings and pho­tographs that unabashedly explore the plea­sure— and ten­sion— of look­ing at the female body. While some fig­ures twist and turn spas­mod­i­cally, reveal­ing fleshy exposed ori­fices, oth­ers are seem­ingly caught in sta­tic, pri­vate moments. Span­ning across sev­eral gen­er­a­tions, the exhi­bi­tion, curated by Sarvia Jasso, includes work by Ros­alyn Drexler, K. Gar­cia, Cindy Hinant, Dorothy Ian­none, Manon, Car­olee Schnee­mann, Dasha Shishkin, and Betty Tomp­kins and is on view from June 21–July 31, 2012.

Ros­alyn Drexler (b. 1926) is best known for her small paint­ings of Pop imagery, usu­ally appro­pri­ated from mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers and col­laged onto canvas—a tech­nique she began using in the 1960s. In Self Por­trait, (1964), a scant­ily clad woman kicks her heels up in the air, exud­ing free­dom and con­fi­dence. Real­ity bleeds into fic­tion and fan­tasy as Drexler projects her self-image onto Pop imagery. Inter­est­ingly, dur­ing a brief stint wrestling pro­fes­sion­ally under the name Rosa Carlo The Mex­i­can Spit­fire, Drexler became one of Andy Warhol’s sub­jects.

Since the 1960s, Dorothy Ian­none (b.1933) has focused her pro­duc­tion on the power of female sex­u­al­ity and the spir­i­tual tran­scen­dence that results from phys­i­cal union. Included in this exhi­bi­tion is The Man Who Became A Woman, (c. 1963), a small and sin­gu­lar work in which Ian­none makes a bold state­ment about the mal­leabil­ity of gen­der.

Betty Tomp­kins (b. 1945) has been cre­at­ing large-scale pho­to­re­al­is­tic paint­ings of explicit sex­ual imagery since 1969. Dur­ing this time, which was also the height of min­i­mal­ism in New York, Tomp­kins dealt with crit­i­cism from fem­i­nists at home and cen­sor­ship abroad. Shortly after her work was included in the Lyon Bien­nale in 2003, Tomp­kins’ work received deserved atten­tion once again and the artist pro­ceeded to make her sig­na­ture Fuck, Cunt and Kiss paint­ings. Fuck Paint­ing #45, (2011) is included in this exhi­bi­tion.

A pio­neer body, video, per­for­mance and instal­la­tion artist, Car­olee Schnee­mann (b. 1939) par­tic­i­pated in the orig­i­nal Hap­pen­ings that took place in New York in the late 1950s. This exhi­bi­tion includes an impor­tant work from her oeu­vre, Unex­pect­edly Research, in which Schnee­mann revis­its per­for­mances that she orig­i­nally pre­sented between 1962–1982. While review­ing the exten­sive archive, Schnee­mann real­ized her images were uncon­sciously influ­enced by non-Western and Indo-European arti­facts. Unex­pect­edly Research pairs these images side by side, man­i­fest­ing the power of the uncon­scious mind, while also ref­er­enc­ing the ancient mys­ti­cal fem­i­nine sources in Schneemann’s work.

Manon (b.1946) is a Swiss artist who has been pho­tograph­ing her­self in dif­fer­ent guises since the early 1970s, explor­ing a range of gen­ders and sex­u­al­i­ties. In Das Dop­pelz­im­mer (The Dou­ble Room, 1982), a pho­to­graphic series that orig­i­nally includes thirty images, Manon and her male coun­ter­part mir­ror each other in var­i­ous poses. In the Pink includes a sin­gle pho­to­graph in which Manon’s nudity is jux­ta­posed with her “dou­ble” who wears a full suit. As she stares directly into his eyes, Manon cre­ates a del­i­cate bal­ance of being both the object and artist in con­trol.

Cindy Hinant (b. 1984) also works with pho­tog­ra­phy, sculp­ture and instal­la­tion. In Women (2011), images of women were taken from the Inter­net, cropped and then sat­u­rated in a soft pink shade. Each of the nine pho­tographs depicts one artist whose nude torso was found online. Hinant makes their breasts the focal point while their per­sonal iden­ti­ties and artis­tic con­tri­bu­tions remain hid­den. Using the same approach as some of the early feminists—sexualizing and cre­at­ing pow­er­ful images of the female body to chal­lenge the male gaze—Hinant con­tests the assump­tion that the body is only a site of visual con­sump­tion.

K. Gar­cia (b. 1978) sub­verts cul­tural taboos, delv­ing into explo­rations of gen­der, sex­u­al­ity, psy­chol­ogy and their rela­tion­ship to both art his­tory and con­tem­po­rary pop zeit­geist. For In the Pink, Gar­cia exhibits a draw­ing from the series Carla. Here we see Carla trans­formed from an abject state into an angu­lar incar­na­tion now renamed Carla O. Lisk.  Stim­u­lated by the gaze of her por­traitist, Carla per­forms a sex­ual act. Con­se­quently what is depicted in Carla O. Lisk is the ten­u­ous rela­tion­ship between sub­ject and viewer, where the sub­ject, empow­ered by the gaze of the artist, moves beyond the object–Carla’s posi­tion is active, pro­duc­tive, as exem­pli­fied by the heels of her stiletto break­ing the bor­der of the frame.

Also known for her detailed draw­ings, Dasha Shishkin (b. 1977) illus­trates fan­tas­ti­cal and car­ni­va­lesque worlds with­out pre­scribed nar­ra­tives. In What Do You Mean You Can’t Of Course You Can (2012), two female fig­ures (one pink, one yel­low) lay motion­less on a plat­form, sur­rounded by a group of fig­ures with phal­lic noses. Chunks of their but­tocks have fallen off, reveal­ing blood-red body tis­sue. Using a bright color palette and unre­strained lines, Shishkin leaves it up to the viewer to dis­cern the action that spans across the can­vas.