
FEMALE TROUBLE 2
June 28 - August 3, 2019
“NICE GIRLS DON’T WEAR CHA CHA HEELS!” - John Waters, Female Trouble
“If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.” - Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is pleased to announce Female Trouble 2, a group exhibition of California based artists including Jamee Crusan, Maria Guzman Capron, Trulee Hall, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Desiree Holman and Michele Pred. The exhibition runs from June 28 through August 3, 2019, with an artist’s reception on Friday, June 28 from 6-8 PM.
Now in its second installment, this exhibition series takes its name from John Waters’ 1974 spectacular cult-trash film Female Trouble, starring drag performer Divine as Dawn Davenport, a high school dropout who takes misbehaving and rebellion to the ultimate level.
We are living through a moment of contestation, and the body remains a political battleground. The last few months have ushered in new attacks on women’s and transgender rights in the USA and, in some states, the criminalization of women’s reproductive choices. At the same time, from the crowds that took to the streets for the post-election Women’s Marches to #MeToo, #TimesUp, and new intersectional, internationalist, and transgender movements, the category of “woman” and female-identified, non-binary, and trans bodies have become renewed sites of critical engagement and activism across cultural registers. As reactionary attacks on women’s rights align with attempts to control the definition of woman, a new generation of gender dissident and radical feminists is disrupting the status quo, demanding radical gender equality and an end to patriarchal violence in all its forms.
Female Trouble 2 features the work of female, non-binary, and trans artists whose work takes up the racialized and gendered body as a site of artistic and critical investigation. Michele Pred’s work addresses issues such as reproductive rights, gun violence, and the race and gender pay gap, with messages such as “VOTE PRO CHOICE” and “FEMINIST AS FUCK” emblazoned with LED lights on vintage handbags. Jamee Crusan explores non-binary identity, queer desire and “queer exhaustion” through performative sculpture and video. Desiree Holman explores the body as a collective site through new ceramic sculptures depicting an intimate choreography of flesh on flesh. Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle bears witness to African and African American women who have disappeared from the historical record. Maria Guzman Capron and Trulee Hall portray the female form as raw, potent, authoritative and taking up all the space. Says Guzman Capron of her work: “I make powerful creatures: muscular, extremely flexible, hyper-human, more than what we could be. Each piece is a potential being that is female, animal, humorous, and otherworldly. They are rooted in the feminine but not limited by it, seeking to go beyond a binary to a hyperbolic self.”
The works in this exhibition challenge and resist social expectations of feminine behavior, celebrating the misbehaving, gender-defying, norm-disrupting and gaze-reversing aspects of femininity, womanhood, and non-binary gender.
Proceeds from the sales of works in Female Trouble 2 will benefit the ACLU and other organizations fighting the #abortionbans and other violence to female, femme, and trans identifying persons.