FEMALE TROUBLE

“NICE GIRLS DON’T WEAR CHA CHA HEELS!”

CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is pleased to announce Female Trouble, a group exhibition of Bay Area affiliated artists including Angela Hennessy, Desiree Holman, Amy Nathan, Marcela Pardo Ariza, Samantha Rosenwald, and Cate White. The exhibition runs from June 9 through July 28, with an artist’s reception on Saturday, June 9 from 5-8 PM.

The exhibition 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.

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” has become a renewed site of critical engagement and activism across cultural registers. Female-identified, non-binary, trans, and queer butch/femme of all genders are disrupting the status quo and demanding radical gender equality and an end to patriarchal violence in all its forms. 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 and womanhood in all its guises.

Marcela Pardo Ariza (b. 1991 Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Ariza explores the relationship of wry humor, queerness and representation through color sets and prop-like objects. Their photographs incorporate quotidian objects in seemingly absurd ways creating tableaux that mix recognizable elements with magical realism. Ariza is interested in the action of looking within the theatricality of “the set” and their visually provoking portraits seek to explore metaphors regarding race and gender. Ariza is the recipient of the Tosa Studio Award, a Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award and is a finalist for the 2017 San Francisco Artist Award. She received her BA from Earlham College, Richmond, IN in 2013 and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 2016. Their work has been recently exhibited at R/SF Projects (San Francisco), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, CA); De:Formal Gallery (New York, NY); Alter Space (San Francisco, CA); Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and ProArts (Oakland, CA). Ariza works in the Program and Pedagogy department at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and is a current member of the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure.

Angela Hennessy (b. 1971, Carmel, CA) is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary textile theory. Through writing, studio work, and performance her practice examines mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth. Her current project, The School of the Dead, is a program for the decolonization of death and grief through the radical inquiry of aesthetic and social practices that mediate the boundary between the living and the dead. Hennessy has exhibited at Southern Exposure (San Francisco, CA), Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, WA), Exit Art (New York, NY), Ampersand International Arts and Southern Exposure (San Francisco, CA), Pro Arts Gallery and the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, CA) and the Richmond Art Center (Richmond, CA). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum and was featured in the Journal of Cloth and Culture and In The Make: Studio Visits with Artists.

Desiree Holman (b. 1974, Montgomery, AL) is an accomplished interdisciplinary artist focused in the fields of expanded cinema, performance, public artworks as well as traditional gallery works. Her multi-sensory work positions groups of individuals and theatrical tools, like costumes or props, in settings that illuminate ideas of identity. The artist’s work reveals a complex dialogue about truth and the experience of the ‘real’ world and is underpinned by a creative investigation into social equality through the use of character play. Holman holds a Masters degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Earning critical acclaim for her work, Holman was awarded a San Francisco Modern Museum of Art SECA award in 2008 and in 2007 the Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. From 2016-2017, she returned to SFMOMA as a fellow in the Film & Performance Department with a new works commission. Solo exhibitions of her work include the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2009), Montreal’s SKOL (2016), Denver’s Black Cube Nomadic Museum (2015), and the Berkeley Art Museum’s MATRIX program (2011). International exhibitions of Holman’s work include the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Berlin’s Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Milan’s BnD, Montréal’s Centre des Arts Actuals SKOL and Toronto’s YYZ. Reviews of Holman’s work appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Los Angeles Times, NY Arts, Artillery, San Francisco Chronicle and Artweek. Her work is represented by CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions in San Francisco and Aspect/Ratio in Chicago.

Amy Nathan (b.1973, Madison, Wisconsin) is an artist and curator based in Berkeley, California. She received her MFA from Mills College in 2018. She will be a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2018-2019. She is the director of Underline Projects, a non-commercial, experimental gallery space in her home in Berkeley; and a co-director of Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland, California. Her work will be included in New American Paintings MFA Annual in the summer of 2018.

Samantha Rosenwald (b. 1994, Los Angeles, CA) is an LA-based artist working primarily with painting, coloring, and ceramic. Threading together contemporary art practice and the traditions and anomalies of art history, Rosenwald creates compositions that throw historical and social gold standards under the bus. Funny, bizarre, and quietly sad, her work mockingly performs the ideals she wishes to live up to, and, through this, demonstrates their absurdity. Through humor, visual pun, and an overarching sensation of dissociative ennui, Rosenwald delineates the anxiety and strangeness of being a person. Rosenwald received an MFA in Fine Art from California College of the Arts in 2018 and a BA in Art History from Vassar College in 2016.

Cate White (b. 1971, Ukiah, CA) lives and works in Oakland, CA. Originally form the back woods of northern California, Cate White received a BA from Dominican University in 1994, after which she returned to some different back-woods for the duration of her 20s. She began painting at age 30 in 2002 and earned her MFA from John F. Kennedy University's Arts and Consciousness program in Berkeley, CA in 2012. In the last 5 years Cate has exhibited worked in Denmark, Los Angeles, Atlanta and the Bay Area, with solo shows in San Francisco, Oakland and Hayward. She has presented at the Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College and University of California, Berkeley. While primarily a painter, she also works in sculpture, video and bookmaking. She received the 2013-2014 ProArts 2x2 Solos Award, the 2014-2015 Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts, and was a grantee at the Roswell-Artist-in-Residence program in New Mexico. Her 10-volume book series The Book of Life is available from Half Truth Press on Amazon.