August 22, 2017
I have two bodies of work appearing in the IT HAPPENED exhibition at the George Caleb Bingham Gallery at the University of Missouri. Curators Katina Bitsicas and Lee Ann Woolery are including FIELDWORK in a new edition, as well as the premiere exhibition of my suite A MAN WALKED BY AND WANTED TO BUY US.
Exhibition dates: Monday, August 28 to Thursday, September 21, 2017, 8 am-5 pm
Location: George Caleb Bingham Gallery, A126 Fine Arts Center, Department of Art, University of Missouri-Columbia campus (corner of Hitt St and University Ave)
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 31, 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm, George Caleb Bingham Gallery, University of Missouri-Columbia campus
About the works:
Both works are from my larger body of work OUT HERE DEATH IS NO BIG DEAL – FIELDWORK has been on exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in NYC (14 February – March 25, 2015), the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe (June 2017-August 2017) and published in Guernica magazine (21 March 2015).
A suite of photographs, essays, poems, texts, solo performance works, artifacts, video installations, and site-specific gestures, FIELDWORK and A MAN WALKED BY AND WANTED TO BUY US is based in autobiography and memoir, and inhabits the artist’s decades as an activist in gender-based violence in the Southwest and US-Mexico border. FIELDWORK invokes the artist’s alter-ego, Vulture Vigilante – a skinwalker hybridized of half-woman, half-scavenger of the dead – who returns to the sites where femicided women’s bodies were dumped or buried and hidden. The project surrounds the physical and erotic bodies and psyches of women – field workers, victims, survivors – within the context of pervasive violence and death. It is part of the artist’s body of work OUT HERE DEATH IS NO BIG DEAL addressing the lives of women navigating the tangle of predatory institutional and personal violence in the desert borderlands between Northern Mexico, the Tohono O’Odham Nation, and the southwest United States.
Sponsors:
University of Missouri (MU) Digital Storytelling Program, University of Missouri Extension, MU Art Department’s George Caleb Bingham Gallery, MU Women and Gender Studies Program, MU Office for Civil Rights & Title IX, MU School of Social Work, MU Women’s Center, MU RSVP Center, MU Counseling Center, and MU School of Social Work