Review: Women & Their Work’s “We Know Who We Are. We Know What We Want.” – Arts

Gentle floods the brand new dwelling – the brand new everlasting dwelling – of Ladies & Their Work, streaming by home windows giant and small throughout, illuminating the artwork in “We Know Who We Are. We Know What We Need,” the gallery’s inaugural exhibition. These works, nonetheless, generate their very own mild – mild launched by some deeper understanding of who we’re and the way we dwell.

The 9 artists on this group present delve into questions of place, of identification, of humanity, of historical past that encourage extended contemplation and dialogue. I is probably not the particular person finest outfitted to talk to all the parts within the works right here, being neither a lady nor an individual of coloration, however I can say that what I did see, what I might grasp, held me, took me to locations I might not been, turned wheels in my thoughts.

To take one instance: Rehab El Sadek, who depicts the elusiveness of reminiscence in The Outsider. 5 window frames grasp subsequent to the big image home windows on the gallery’s west wall. Every of the frames is roofed with gauze, and painted onto the gauze are buildings and textual content, however nothing is full. Elements are pale or erased, as if the gauze, itself so fragile a material, couldn’t maintain on to the imprinted imagery, the reminiscences of those locations and phrases, and they also’re now misplaced. For the reason that frames are hung earlier than the home windows that look out right into a courtyard, the bodily world is all the time seen by the works – the current all the time current as we try the Sisyphean job of reconstructing the previous. El Sadek depicts our sense of the previous as one thing tantalizing and delightful however endlessly frail and incomplete.

Elsewhere within the gallery, the previous can be summoned. Lauren Cross brings ahead from her grandmother’s time Black ladies – particularly spiritual Black ladies – who offered power and management to their sisters within the religion. In Daisy’s Informal Nook (Daisy being Mrs. Daisy Mae Harper Lucas, Cross’ grandmother), the artist has taken a booklet illustrating methods to tie scarves (sq. drape, bay tie, bib drape, butterfly scarf, and so forth.) and by integrating images of Black ladies activists into the scarf-tying directions, made it additionally a tribute to those ladies. And in A Name to Black Ladies/Calling All Daisies, a collection of digital prints, she’s merged photographs – bushes, flowers in a vase, a potted plant, Black ladies of previous generations – and textual content: “a politics of respectability,” “tower of power,” “Jesus taught new attitudes towards ladies,” the names of all the ladies within the Bible. We are able to see each an honoring of ancestors and a name to ladies now to emulate their instance.

Lahib Jaddo remembers her grandmother as effectively in Anna and Mama on the Roof and Anna and the Boys, each painted re-creations of images of her in Iraq. Within the latter, her grandmother Anna is with eight males, largely boys, and on the portray Jaddo has written the detailed story of Anna’s marriage to the identical man her sister had married, after her sister died in childbirth; the kids each sisters had by him; and the way, after one among her grownup stepsons moved away, Anna was left “to determine the way to feed her 5” on her personal. As Jaddo notes to clarify why Anna is posing solely with “the boys”: “It is a patriarchal society.” However she additionally notes: “I put on my grandma’s tattoo.” These phrases inform every thing concerning the work: Jaddo’s information of the restrictions and pressures on ladies in that world and her grandmother’s power in combating it.

Far more is occurring within the exhibit than artists exploring their relationships to the previous. There are potent expressions of girls being oppressed and shamed and denied their humanity, in addition to ladies having their energy and ingenuity affirmed. There are representations of 1’s struggles with up to date points and with connections with those that are completely different. Every artist is engaged in a significant investigation of life, and every artist is deserving of her personal full evaluate. I remorse not with the ability to present them.

Curator Vicki Meek has chosen this exhibition’s artists correctly, not just for their ability and artistry, however as a result of they embody the 2 statements within the exhibit title. Taking a look at their artwork, they clearly know who they’re and what they need. And since Meek has assembled ladies of such various backgrounds, who strategy their artwork from such completely different instructions in such completely different mediums, additionally they embody the group that is exhibiting their artwork. They’re ladies, and that is their work – “work” not solely within the sense of their artwork but in addition within the sense of their calling, their pursuit in life. Their work is to inquire into the human situation, the situation of being a lady, of being a lady in a patriarchal society, of being a Black girl in a white society. And in that work, they illuminate these circumstances for all of us.

“We Know Who We Are. We Know What We Need.”

Ladies & Their Work, 1311 E. Cesar Chavez
womenandtheirwork.org
Via Sept. 21