'Weird Woman' Disrupts Clichés

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"Weird Woman," 2017, installation shot showing “Librarian’s Chain” by Mary Margaret Morgan in foreground. Photo by Jared Tiller.

Weird Woman, a group exhibition at Jarvis Hall Gallery in Calgary, evokes a romantic, defiant and otherworldly feel. Curated by Calgary artist Sondra Meszaros, it features five Canadian and American artists who use a range of methods, including video, collage, assemblage, drawing and digital print. Disrupting clichéd notions of female intuition, aesthetic, currency and rebellion, these artists use meaningful motifs to explore the relationships between nature, production and what Meszaros calls wilful or wayward ways of representing women.

An unsettling yet enchanting mood prevails, owing to the sparseness of the exhibition, on view until Sept. 9, and the rules governing each artist’s aesthetics and processes. Within each work, the material and the inspirational converge into entanglements of conflicting forces.

In Toronto-based artist Claire Greenshaw’s Just The One Time (2017), a pearl necklace containing a lone tooth hangs delicately from a wire holder approximately three feet above the floor. For all its beauty and otherworldly effect, Greenshaw’s sculpture engages in a quiet yet vaguely threatening seduction. The curious arrangement casts a wall shadow in the shape of a penis, conjuring images of a man ejaculating on the neck or breast of a woman. In relation to this piece, Greenshaw presents a meticulously rendered drawing, Research (2016), which depicts her butt cheeks squished against the glass of a photocopier.

Echoing this sentiment of danger and self-reflection is Minnesota artist Mary Margaret Morgan’s Law of Attraction (2015), a video loop of a spider wrapping its prey. On an accompanying audio loop, Oprah Winfrey whispers clichéd warnings that ignoring your intuition will lead to your demise. This lyrical piece both lulls and repels the viewer through a conflicting tale of personal enlightenment and destruction.

The body, both empowered and entrapped, is beautifully articulated in a second piece by Morgan, Librarian’s Chain (2017), in which an emaciated snake-like creature loops across the floor, lifting its spectacled face into the light. Constructed in shades of swampy green using wire, gimp and watercolour, this seemingly wretched creature miraculously rises out of the muck.

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"Weird Woman," 2017, installation shot showing “Librarian’s Chain” by Mary Margaret Morgan in foreground. Photo by Jared Tiller.

New York-based Canadian artist Karen Azoulay’s framed collages, made with tempera, digital prints and tissue paper, employ a playful game of camouflage with enigmatic faces emerging from an arrangement of tinted blocks, negative space and textures. Intuition Matrix with Pollen (2017) reveals an enchanting image of a forest-dwelling creature crowned in an aura of delicate petals, while Early Winter Disguise (2017) conjures an oppressive image of involuntary hibernation or entrapment.

Such contrasting themes are further probed in Reclining Wheel – Flower Press – Nine Steps, an installation by Calgary-born Jenine Marsh, now based in Toronto. Nine concrete stepping-stones dispersed throughout the gallery are used to press arrangements of dried flowers, visible around the edges of each stone. The preservation of flora is a wilful act that acknowledges flowers as romantic and scientific objects worthy of reverence and study.

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Detail of "Weird Woman," 2017, installation shot showing “Reclining Wheel – Flower Press – Nine Steps” by Jenine Marsh. Photo by Jared Tiller.

The most explicit work in the show is the multi-panel collage, Triple Jeopardy (2017), by Carmen Winant, who is based in Columbus, Ohio. Set against a backdrop of vintage orange, its 12 panels contain a mash-up of clippings from ’70s feminist propaganda. This piece contemplates sisterhood as a powerful force, expressed through multiple images of fists in the air in an unabashed celebration of feminist revolution.

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"Weird Woman," 2017, installation shot showing “Triple Jeopardy” by Carmen Winant on wall. Photo by Jared Tiller.

Whether fragmented or evoked by connotation, the earthly and intuitive body is inescapable in Weird Woman. As Meszaros asserts, these artists are clearly “comfortable with being agitators, disturbing expectations and creating complicated narratives that both harness and challenge their connection to nature.”