GLASSBORO, NJ.- Rowan University Art Gallery welcomes Sidney Mullis who will be joining the Department of Art this spring for the annual Artist in Residence program.
Kicking off her semester-long residency, Mullis presents Legs Together a nimble and playful exhibition diving into the fluidity of gender, sexuality, and identity. Her work includes performance-based video, interactive objects and sculpture. Through her work she visually accentuates the plasticity of social constructs and the traditions surrounding them with humor and wit.
Artist Statement
In my creative research, I find myself wedged in a space where gender matters tremendously and matters not very much at all. Gender, agreed to be a social construct, regularly flirts with sexuality. They can be distinct from one another, but are usually involved. Both are serious subjects of study consistently under scrutiny to understand what they really are; yet, they operate on fluid spectrums of ever expanding lexicons. Again, mattering to admit to not mattering at all. It is this very instability of their categories that produces such intrigue and pleasure for me as a maker.
Driven by haptic obsession, it is through making that I try to understand them and then push their instability even more. With performance-based video, interactive objects and sculpture, I ask what it means to woman – and to understand the narrow bandwidth in which she is performed despite her shifting reality.
Considering gender to be a stylized repetition of acts, I study how woman is looped in social space. I study her from a coming-of-age transition meaning that I focus on when bodies learn to repeat the gestures that communicate gender. I often use techniques suitable for children’s crafts, such as papier-mâché and hand sewing. I employ materials intended for young girls to perform the socially appropriate script, such as spandex leotards and fake fingernails. Withholding their cultural signifiers associated with to-be-woman, I merge these techniques and materials to interrupt and remix existing codes and directives. These combinations are then situated in space or on the body to be recorded for video. For example, in the video projection Mating Ritual of the Pink-nibbed popper, I speculate how form and movement carry gender by performing women’s movements found in hip-hop music videos and mashing those with captured sound bites from women in my life and mating movements documented in the Animal Kingdom. To build this invented creature, I use fabric marketed to women to sew baby girl blankets and glittery, plastic Christmas décor for the home.
My studio practice is visual playground to probe how gender exists. Like a wedge, a tool that both secures and splits other forms, I go in-between to produce work from a space where gender categories dissolve and cross-fade.
Sidney Mullis lives and works in State College, PA. Her work includes performance based video, interactive objects and sculpture. She has exhibited in a number of locations including Berlin, Germany and Tokyo, Japan. She has had solo shows at the Leslie Lohman Museum (NYC), Future Tenant Gallery (Pittsburgh), Bucknell University, University of Mary Washington, and more. Recent group exhibitions include Galleri Heike Arndt (Berlin), Trestle Gallery (NYC), Galleri Urbane (Dallas), pehrspace (LA), and Area 405 (Baltimore). Sidney Mullis is the recipient of the MASS MoCA residency, Ox-Bow MFA Residency, and a Creative Achievement Award from Penn State University. Sidney Mullis is represented by Galleri Urbane (Dallas, TX).
